Food for pet turtles, adapter plugs for overseas travel and hand-held paint sprayers used to be difficult to find at local grocery stores, but Peng Texiang, who owns a store in South China's Guangdong province, said he is now routinely able to sell these products online through delivery apps.

 

"To some extent, COVID-19 has changed people's shopping habits, and my customers are mostly those who live within 10 kilometers of the store and their orders can be delivered within an hour," Peng said.

 

Brick-and-mortar stores are making a comeback across Chinese cities under the impact of the COVID-19, innovating new products, services and business models to embrace the trend of instant retail.

 

Peng's store started doing instant retail business in 2015 through mobile applications such as Ele.me and Meituan. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019, he has seen a spike in both offline shopping and online orders.

 

Nearly 1,000 orders are placed each day and the variety of commodities sold in the store has expanded by the dozen, Peng said.

 

Over the past decade, China's e-commerce has advanced tremendously, with a highly efficient delivery system that employs a large number of deliverymen.

 

By taking advantage of their physical location, offline stores are capable of offering customers delivery within one hour or even 30 minutes, catering to changing consumer demand that prefers buying according to need rather than in bulk.

 

According to a report released by global management and consulting giant Accenture, over half of customers born after 1995 expect their online orders to arrive within the day, and 7 percent expect to receive products within two hours after placing an order online.

 

Experts believe that instant retail thrives partly because people are moving around less to prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Xing Linbo, dean of Evaluation Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said instant retail not only makes buying easy and convenient for customers but also boosts small-and-medium-sized businesses, and has gradually become a new driving force in China's consumer market.

 

The volume of instant retail is expected to surpass 1 trillion yuan ($145.1 billion) by 2025, according to research center iResearch.

 

However, instant retail requires heavy investment in human resources, technical support and marketing. Only by developing profitable models can its overall market size grow steadily, said Lai Youwei, head of Meituan Research Institute.