BEIJING (PingWest) — Freshippo, Alibaba’s grocery chain leveraging “new retail” to converge online and offline shopping, opened a new membership retail store, Freshippo X, in Shanghai on September 28. It offers delivery within a 20-kilometer radius to users who ordered online on its app. Following Freshippo, Freshippo mini and Hexiaoma, Freshippo X became a new retail format in Shanghai, consolidating Shanghai’s central position of online economy.

As the first Chinese membership retail store, Freshippo X offers online-to-offline retail services. Products are delivered directly from warehouse or distributed delivery terminals to customers with a promise of half-day delivery.

Advanced in supply chain, Freshippo imported products from 84 countries across the world to provide selected products to customers. 40% of Freshippo products are private-label brands, and nearly 10% of products were directly imported from factories in foreign countries with no intermediate resellers, saving product and logistics costs.

“We know better about Chinese dietary preferences, so Freshippo X is localized for Chinese people,” said Zhao Jiayu, General Manager of Freshippo Purchase and Sales Department.

The Freshippo X membership project was initiated in Shanghai early in 2018, and was rolled out in more cities, including Beijing, Xi’an, and Chengdu in 2019. Shanghai lead Freshippo’s membership scale with a number of 500,000 compared with other 7 cities with the same membership service. Therefore, the project has expanded to a store in Shanghai, which possibly will become a template for more incoming Freshippo X stores.