Have pre-positioned warehouses, once dismissed as "impossible to turn a profit", become popular again?
Only when the platform has a sufficient number of orders can it maintain turnover and fulfillment efficiency, and have the confidence to secure pricing power from the upstream supply chain, thereby squeezing more profits from the intermediate links of commodity circulation. This is also the fundamental reason why major manufacturers keep expanding their warehouses.
The dark store, once regarded as "impossible to be profitable", is now being re-evaluated by industry giants for its value.
Over the past two months, Hema has closed three 8-year-old stores in Beijing, namely Jinyuan, Lize and Jingkai, in one go; the first Hema Fresh store in Hangzhou, located in Canal Shangjie, has also posted a closure notice.
However, while closing stores, Hema is accelerating the deployment of its dark stores across the country. Recently, Jiang Fan, CEO of Alibaba E-Commerce Business Group, stated at the earnings call that the company will accelerate the integration of related sectors such as Hema and Tmall Supermarket, especially the development of dark stores.
According to reports from Tech Planet, Hema has re-opened dark stores within a 3-kilometer radius of some closed stores in Beijing. In addition, Hema is also recruiting offline promotion channel service providers for dark stores in multiple cities across the country.
Closing large stores and opening small dark warehouses is not an action exclusive to Hema.
Meituan Xiaoxiang Supermarket has more than 2,000 dark stores, and it plans to add 800 more this year; JD 7FRESH is rapidly expanding its store-warehouse network through the "1 Store + N Warehouses" model; even RT-Mart has successively opened new dark stores in four cities.
This dark store model, which once dragged Missfresh into trouble and kept Dingdong Maicai struggling for years, has unexpectedly become a sought-after choice again. Perhaps it is not the dark store that has changed, but the way major players calculate their accounts.
1. Major Players Recalculate Their Accounts
In this round of dark store expansion, Hema's actions are the most typical.
In March 2024, Yan Xiaolei, former CFO of Hema, succeeded founder Hou Yi as CEO of Hema, and launched a round of organizational restructuring.
Hema abandoned its years of exploration in multiple business formats and began to focus on two major formats: Hema Fresh and Super Hema NB. After that, Hema launched a streamlining plan, successively closing large store formats such as Hema X Member Store and Hema Outlet.
But at the same time, Hema did not slow down its pace, but focused on the expansion of Super Hema NB. As of mid-June, Hema's Super Hema NB had a total of 546 stores nationwide.
Yan Xiaolei's account logic is very simple: the stores she closed are not those with poor business, but those that "cannot make ends meet financially".
Over the past years, Hema has been advancing rapidly in the experimental field of new retail. Although it has produced a successful model like Hema Fresh, after years of radical expansion and business format trial and error, profitability has not been achieved for a long time.
Therefore, Yan Xiaolei, who has a CFO background at Hema, brought in a more typical financial-oriented business philosophy: prioritize revenue and pursue efficiency above all else.
In the era of instant retail, the starting point of competition has been greatly advanced, and the inventory of high-quality goods must be in place before consumers place orders. All retail players must focus more on their operational efficiency, with a leaner organization and faster response, to customize products that meet consumer demands in advance and deliver them with higher fulfillment efficiency, so as to seize the first-mover advantage.
In this efficiency competition, it is only a matter of time before those stores and business formats that cannot achieve financial viability are closed. After a round of adjustment, the effect is obvious. According to Alibaba's 2026 fiscal annual report, Hema has achieved adjusted EBITA profitability for the second consecutive year. After CEO Yan Xiaolei's reporting line was adjusted from Wu Zeming to Jiang Fan, Hema also ushered in new changes.
According to reports from Photon Planet, a person close to Alibaba said that after Yan Xiaolei's reporting line was changed to Jiang Fan, it means that Hema must deeply cooperate with Taobao Flash Purchase, and the group's requirement is to fully shift its focus to the development of dark stores.
It is reported that Hema is adopting the "store-to-warehouse conversion" model, directly transforming closed offline stores into dark stores, or opening more dark stores nearby. Up to now, the number of its dark stores nationwide has exceeded 500.
It can be seen that what Hema wants is not only a denser network of stores and warehouses, but also a strategic collaborative network that can be integrated with Alibaba's e-commerce business. Dark stores are a key link to connect near-field and far-field scenarios and make up for the instant fulfillment capability.
At the same time, Meituan, JD and other platforms are also accelerating their pace of action.
In February this year, Meituan acquired Dingdong Maicai, obtaining about 1,000 dark stores and filling the density gap in the East China region. In addition, Meituan also plans to add 800 new dark stores this year.
JD, through the "1 Store + N Warehouses" model of JD 7FRESH, connects the link of "online experience + home delivery fulfillment"; recently, JD announced that JD Instant Delivery's dark stores have covered cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other cities, covering more than daily consumer goods categories.
Not only that, even traditional supermarkets are accelerating their integration into instant retail.
RT-Mart has deployed dark stores in four cities including Tianjin and Shanghai at one go, building a "one-hour delivery + next-day delivery" service; Yonghui Supermarket has opened more than 40 dark stores in the form of "Yonghui Online Supermarket" in cities including Chongqing and Fuzhou.
The fact that everyone is doing the same thing unanimously shows that dark stores are indeed different now.
The logic behind this is that instant retail has become an unavoidable and must-win battlefield for the retail industry. In the eyes of consumers, no matter it is the traditional retail model or the new retail model, they must meet the requirement of "fast delivery" on the basis of guaranteed product quality.
When "instant gratification" has evolved from a consumer preference to a choice embedded in daily life, retail terminals that cannot "speed up" will inevitably be left further and further behind by the times.
2. Are Dark Stores No Longer Unprofitable?
From the supply side, the resurgence of the dark store model is more like a collective response of the retail industry to changes in consumer behavior.
When "speed" has changed from a bonus point to a basic requirement, dark stores are no longer a dispensable supplement, but an infrastructure that determines fulfillment efficiency and user experience. Whoever places goods closer to consumers will be closer to the next round of growth.
But the question is, how can the dark store model, which was once sentenced to "death" by industry leaders, continue to develop today.
In 2019, Hou Yi, then CEO of Hema, publicly stated that "the dark store is a pseudo-proposition for investors and it is impossible to make profits."
This is not a prejudice, but the fact at that time. Missfresh, the pioneer of the dark store model, collapsed in 2022; Dingdong Maicai and Pupu Supermarket did not achieve their first annual profit until 2023 and 2024 respectively.
Hou Yi believes that the dark store model has three unsolvable pain points: low customer unit price, high loss rate, and difficulty in ensuring gross profit margin.
In his view, if it were not for the influx of capital that competed for the market through subsidies, most platforms would not be able to afford the cash burn, and this model would hardly survive.
The fact that several fresh e-commerce platforms either went bankrupt or took 6-8 years of hard work to achieve profitability has verified Hou Yi's judgment. But a few years later, why can the dark store model make a comeback?
From the perspective of the model itself, the operational logic of dark stores has not changed: it still acts as a distribution station within 3 kilometers of consumers, and riders complete the last-mile fulfillment in about 30 minutes.
What has really changed is the operational efficiency of the entire retail industry.
The first change is the product structure.
In the past, dark stores mainly delivered fresh produce, dairy products, snacks, daily chemicals and other categories. Although these categories have high repurchase rates, their gross profit margins are generally low, and the loss rate of fresh fruits and vegetables is difficult to reduce.
Huachuang Securities once pointed out in a research report that the gross profit margin of fresh produce business is generally below 20%; in contrast, the gross profit margin of industries such as beauty and apparel reaches 60%-80%. Platforms that deliver a large amount of fresh fruits and vegetables can hardly leave enough profit margin for themselves.
Therefore, major platforms have begun to find ways to adjust their product structure, for example, increasing the proportion of self-operated products and private brands, and raising gross profit margins by shortening the supply chain links; adding products such as beauty and 3C electronics to offset the high loss and low gross profit of fresh produce.
Among them, the development of instant retail is a good opportunity. For example, after Hema's in-depth collaboration with Taobao Flash Purchase, it can introduce richer commodity resources, further expanding its business boundaries and growth space.
The second change is the customer unit price.
When the categories of fresh e-commerce platforms expand from fresh produce to daily consumer goods, both the customer unit price and gross profit margin are increased, leaving greater room for the platform's profit growth.
Take Dingdong Maicai as an example. Its customer unit price was around 50 yuan in the early stage, and has been rising all the way, now stably staying above 70 yuan; the customer unit price of Pupu in its core market Fuzhou even reaches 80 yuan.
The third and most critical change is the improvement of fulfillment efficiency.
On the one hand, all platforms are actively expanding their store and warehouse networks. The denser the warehouse network, the higher the delivery efficiency naturally. In addition, platforms have also increased the number of product SKUs, especially long-tail products, through the lightning warehouse model.
Meituan adopts the "franchise + trusteeship" model to attract mom-and-pop stores and chain brands such as Watsons and Lotus to join, and the number of its lightning warehouses has exceeded 50,000; Taobao Convenience Store has rolled out "flash purchase warehouses" across the country through the franchise model, with the number exceeding 700.
On the other hand, the digital infrastructure of the platform provides more support for fulfillment. For example, Meituan's self-developed Petunia system allows lightning warehouse merchants to understand user needs more clearly, prepare products and formulate marketing strategies more targeted.
With the improvement of operational efficiency of major platforms, the pain points of dark stores are gradually being solved, and this business that was once widely dismissed has begun to be re-evaluated by the market.
3. The Second Half After Expansion
However, getting the business model to work is only the first step. If the dark store model wants to go further, the key still lies in order volume.
Only when the platform has a sufficient number of orders can it maintain turnover and fulfillment efficiency, and have the confidence to secure pricing power from the upstream supply chain, thereby squeezing more profits from the intermediate links of commodity circulation. This is also the fundamental reason why major players keep expanding their warehouses.
But the problem is that instant retail is no longer the business of a single platform.
According to the "China Instant Retail Market Report for the Fourth Quarter of 2025" released by Analysys, in the fourth quarter of 2025, Taobao Flash Purchase and Meituan had very close transaction shares in the instant retail market, accounting for 45.2% and 45% respectively, while JD accounted for 8.4%.
It is worth mentioning that although Alibaba's acquisition of Pupu has not yet been finalized, Pupu Supermarket has piloted its entry into Taobao Flash Purchase. This means that Meituan and Alibaba have respectively included Dingdong and Pupu, the two major fresh e-commerce platforms, into their own camps.
In other words, in only one year, the market pattern of instant retail and fresh e-commerce has been rewritten: as the business boundary between instant retail and fresh e-commerce becomes increasingly blurred, industry competition has long escalated into a full-scale confrontation between the ecosystems of giants.
With more giants involved and fiercer competition, the current market competition is no longer simply a competition for the number of dark stores and the density of the warehouse network, but more dependent on supply chain efficiency, operation and management capabilities, and the synergy of ecological businesses.
For example, in terms of supply chain efficiency, Dingdong Maicai has launched the "12 Hours Fresh" series, which enables seasonal fresh fruits and vegetables to be delivered from the origin to the platform within 24 hours; Pupu gives full play to its regional advantages to provide fresher seafood by deeply cooperating with core producing areas.
Store operation and service capabilities are also key. Stores that originally focused on offline business need to take into account both front-end experience and back-end efficiency under the "integrated store and warehouse" model, which tests the actual operational capability of the store.
On social platforms, many users complain that after Hema was connected to