Someone living in a major Chinese city can decide in the afternoon that they want to make a certain dish in the evening, order the necessary ingredients and equipment on an app, and have it all delivered in time for dinner. In Western countries, most e-commerce companies would have you waiting until the next day, if not longer.

But this past winter in the Netherlands, as temperatures dropped and snow fell heavily, I suddenly found myself craving beef in a simmering, spicy broth. I pulled out my smartphone and searched for hotpot on a new e-commerce app. I spotted a Haidilao gift set containing nearly everything I needed — cookware, soup base, dipping sauces — and immediately placed an order. Just a few hours later, a uniformed delivery driver handed me my package, and I was soon enjoying a steaming hotpot in the comfort of my own home.

This Chinese level of convenience — having anything delivered fast, cheaply, and regardless of the weather — was thanks to Joybuy, an app that recently launched in a handful of European countries. Like its Chinese parent company JD.com, it relies far less on third-party sellers or gig workers than most Western e-commerce companies do. It sources and sells its products in-house, and it has its own delivery teams.

As a digital anthropologist who has long studied e-commerce, the experience made me realize that the way Chinese enterprises operate internationally is changing. In the past, people’s focus on Chinese firms tended to be on cheap exports or large-scale infrastructure projects. But now, new Chinese retail platforms such as Joybuy are exporting more than simply low-priced goods — they’re also exporting a new kind of digital consumerist experience and habit. Just like the Chinese fintech companies I studied for a recent paper, Joybuy is adopting a business model battle-tested by the competitive Chinese market and seeing whether it will prove an advantage abroad.

Early results seem promising. Though most initial Joybuy customers were overseas Chinese purchasing Asian groceries, it has become a major alternative to established e-commerce platforms, with infrastructure and product choices that impress local European consumers.

On the Dutch version of the review website Trustpilot, Joybuy has amassed over 11,000 reviews and a 4.7-star rating. Most positive reviews focus on its good value and fast delivery rather than on the availability of inexpensive Asian products. Some shoppers have even remarked that Joybuy offers a better user experience than Amazon and local platforms, while others say it has changed their impression of Chinese products as cheap and low-quality.

When JD.com first entered the European market under the name “Ochama” in 2022, it sought to attract consumers with futuristic retail stores manned by robots that prepared and delivered packages. However, the approach failed to gain traction. The company subsequently shifted toward the business model for which it is best known in China — focusing on building a logistics system capable of fast, reliable delivery.

This emphasis on logistics and fulfillment efficiency is the same strategy as that of many Chinese e-commerce platforms. The more reliable the fulfillment process, the higher the rate of repeat purchases, which in turn enables warehouse sorting and replenishment, as well as neighborhood delivery operations, to function at the high-turnover pace seen in China’s biggest cities, thereby reducing per-unit logistics costs.

As a result, “China speed” has begun entering the daily lives of European shoppers. London users can receive their orders within hours; German consumers can place an order on Sunday night and receive it early Monday morning; and advertisements in Dutch metro stations promise that a coffee machine ordered before 11 a.m. can be delivered to your home by 11 p.m. the same day. All of this suggests that Joybuy’s delivery speed in Europe is basically on par with its Chinese parent company.

Like on many Chinese e-commerce platforms, the prices are also quite attractive. In the Netherlands, everyday items such as meat and beer are cheaper than in local supermarkets. This reflects the strategy used by Chinese e-commerce companies: offering subsidies and discounts to attract customers, using low prices to expand scale, and spreading fixed operating costs across a larger business volume.

At the same time, the platform also has an almost all-encompassing variety of Chinese e-commerce platforms: from inexpensive packets of pickled mustard greens to furniture and appliances costing hundreds or even thousands of euros; from halal frozen chicken wings to scented products from the Dutch body care brand Rituals; and from American-designed products such as iPhones to viral Chinese tech like Unitree robot dogs and DJI drones. The ambition is not to accelerate one category of shopping, but to reorganize consumption as a whole around a new temporal norm.

This alignment and reorganization of speed, price, reliability, and variety is not incidental: it indicates the increasing penetration of Chinese capital into European cities at the infrastructural and labor levels. Such influence goes beyond the export of made-in-China products and the establishment of a few electric vehicle factories. JD.com is also in the process of buying Ceconomy, the parent company of MediaMarkt and Saturn, two of the largest consumer electronics retail chains in Europe. It’s notable that JD.com began as an electronics retail platform in China.

Of course, there are still challenges. The coverage of categories on Joybuy varies across countries and cities; cold-chain supply remains significantly concentrated in a few regions; fresh food does not include non-frozen foods such as vegetables and eggs; and prices can fluctuate sharply. Whether the asset-heavy model can continue to be profitable in Europe remains to be seen.

More importantly, it’s not yet clear whether Europe’s labor systems, urban cultures, and consumption ethics are ready for Joybuy. The speed and reliability that define JD.com’s model in China did not emerge from infrastructure alone — they were built on top of a particular labor and urban context. China’s large internal migrant workforce found in logistics employment a form of stable, dignified urban work; years of fierce competition among e-commerce giants produced professional norms in which delivery precision became a point of pride and a key performance metric; and the density of Chinese megacities meant that delivery workers could complete enough drops per shift to make employed — rather than gig — labor economically viable for the platform.

None of this requires romanticizing the conditions: the pace is demanding and the metrics are tight. But JD.com offers direct contracts, welfare, and benefits to its delivery team: its full-time employees exceed 900,000, with a majority in logistics.

Replicating this in Europe means operating within a different social contract. European labor law increasingly requires employment classification rather than gig arrangements; union presence in logistics is stronger; working hour protections are more robust. Joybuy has largely chosen to work within these EU constraints rather than around them, employing its own drivers instead of relying on precarious platform labor. This makes the model more resilient than other local quick-commerce competitors that rely on gig labor. But it also means that the model’s long-term profitability depends on generating the order density needed to make employed European logistics labor economically sustainable.

But already, companies like Joybuy have brought about a new phenomenon. Chinese e-commerce platforms are exporting a distinctly Chinese rhythm of e-commerce and daily life. If people would occasionally use Amazon to buy a few household items, gadgets, and furniture, they are now starting to use Joybuy to buy what they have already been buying on Amazon — but often at a lower price — and, more frequently, a variety of groceries under a same-day delivery promise.

Over the past few decades, China has been the world’s factory, supplying goods to Western retail markets, while “Made in China” has often been associated with low prices and poor quality. However, with the development of digital platforms, a new model of globalization is emerging: Chinese enterprises are moving upstream in supply chains, gradually mastering warehousing, logistics, platforms, and user relationships, thereby changing consumer experiences and reshaping what “Made in China” means.

China is no longer just a manufacturing node in the global consumption system but is gradually becoming an organizer linking production, logistics, and consumption networks. The significance of Joybuy lies in bringing a distinctly Chinese urban lifestyle into the kitchens, living rooms, and shopping carts of European urbanites. In doing so, it may be changing the very meaning of e-commerce and consumption.

(Header image: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via VCG)