Meituan and Ele.me are currently the more mainstream food delivery service platforms. Each of them occupies a part of the market share, but there seems to be some unhappiness between these two companies. Perhaps they cannot escape the conclusion that their peers are all enemies. According to relevant reports, the Intermediate People's Court of Huai'an City recently pronounced an unfair competition case between Meituan and Ele.me, ruling that Meituan should compensate Ele.me 352,000 yuan. So what happened? Why is there such a verdict? Many people even say that there have been similar judgments before. Let’s analyze them together.

What happened

According to relevant litigation documents, the cause of the incident was that Meituan set some conditions, such as raising rates, unreasonable trading conditions and other obstacles. Merchants are not free to choose, so in the end many merchants cannot be extracted from Meituan and can freely choose their partners, which also causes Ele.me to lose some potential users and orders. Everyone knows that the profits of food delivery platforms mainly come from merchants' check-in, and then extract a share from each order, and then rely on the platform's data and traffic as well as delivery services to realize transactions between customers and merchants. So Meituan’s behavior is tantamount to hindering the cooperation between merchants and Ele.me. Therefore, it violates the relevant provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and is an unfair competition infringement case.

What similar judgments are there?

In fact, earlier, the Zhejiang Jinhua Intermediate People’s Court heard a case of unfair competition between Ele.me and Meituan. In the end, Meituan also lost the case. What happened? This is because the Meituan platform pushed some information to many cooperative merchants, and some of these messages slandered the Ele.me platform. This caused many merchants to no longer choose to cooperate with Ele.me, and slandered the reputation of the Ele.me platform. , constitutes unfair competition. After the Zhejiang Jinhua Intermediate People's Court found out the reason, it finally ruled that Meituan should pay 1 million yuan in compensation to Ele.me.

Personal opinion

If I just look at this judgment, I personally support the court’s findings and punishment measures. After all, Meituan has many illegal behaviors. . In the process of competing for market share, if you want to occupy a certain customer base, you must improve the quality of service, reduce delivery costs, and make ordering takeout more convenient. This is what consumers expect. Instead of taking some unfair actions, taking deductions or abusing the law through legal means to restrict merchants. In the end, you will definitely reap the consequences. I believe this time it also taught Meituan a big lesson. It not only paid a certain amount of compensation, but also caused great damage to its reputation.