"Amap's Street-Scan Ranking's 'non-commercial breakthrough' hits Meituan's fatal pain point!"
In September 2025, on the day of Alibaba's 26th anniversary, Amap quietly launched the "Street-Scan Ranking." Billed as the "world's first offline-service ranking based on real behavior," it cornered Meituan Dianping. Some say this is "a new platform beating an old one," but the truth is not so simple.
Seeing the essence through the phenomenon: Amap's ability to break through quickly is, in essence, because Meituan itself abandoned the "first principle of platform economics": when Meituan treats "scale" as its moat and "profit" as its sole goal, it gives rivals the chance to strike with a "return to value."
01 The Cognitive Trap of Platform Economics: "Scale = Moat"
As many platforms grow in scale, they fall into a trap: believing that "many users, many merchants, big subsidies" is an unshakable moat. The moat of platform economics has never been these "surface data," but a "closed loop of underlying capabilities" built around the "ultimate value of platform economics (user value + merchant value + ecosystem sustainability)" that rivals cannot easily copy. It must satisfy three core characteristics, none of which can be missing:
Value anchor: anchoring to "long-term demand," not "short-term profit"
A true value anchor is the long-term pain point of users / merchants — for example, users' need for "real recommendations" (fear of bad experiences, fear of fake reviews) and merchants' need for "low-cost customer acquisition" (not being held hostage by traffic). It is not the platform's short-term goal of "how much to earn this quarter." Like Amap's Street-Scan Ranking, which from the start anchored on users' need to "find genuinely good stores," rather than rushing to profit from paid rankings — that is the key to its rapid user appeal.
Core capability: relying on "irreplaceability," not "resource piling"
A true core capability is the underlying logic plus technology / data barriers that "rivals cannot learn or copy." Take Amap's "navigation behavior data": with 13 million daily life-service navigation records, behaviors such as users "navigating specifically to a store from 5 km away" or "repurchasing more than 3 times" simply cannot be faked through brush orders the way Meituan's "reviews" can. By contrast, Meituan's "scale advantage" can be siphoned off by JD with "zero commissions" or by Amap with "real recommendations" — the essence is that its core capability lacks "irreplaceability."
Ecosystem barrier: relying on "positive cycles," not "depletion-style defense"
A true ecosystem barrier self-reinforces and grows stronger with use. For example, the more users use Amap, the richer its navigation behavior data becomes, the more accurate its recommendations are, which in turn attracts more merchants; the more merchants there are, the wider users' choices, which in turn retains more users. This is a "positive cycle." But Meituan relies on huge subsidies to retain users — such "depletion-style defense" does not qualify as a moat at all.
More crucially, the first principle of platform economics is not a "static standard" but a "phase-specific dynamic balance" — platforms at different life-cycle stages have completely different core goals, and judging all stages by a "single standard" only leads into a trap:
Meituan once thought "582 million users + 2.8 million merchants" was an unshakable moat, but it turns out that scale without "value support" is merely a "castle on quicksand."
02 Meituan Besieged: The Continuous Collapse of Its Strategic Moat
Meituan's predicament is not that "Amap is too fierce" or "JD is too ruthless," but that during the critical "growth stage → maturity stage," it repeatedly stepped into three pits of "deviating from the first principle," each corresponding to a "loss of user / merchant value," ultimately causing its moat to collapse completely:
(1) Scale stage (2015–2018): failed to consolidate the "user-trust moat"
In its early days, Meituan built trust through Dianping's "UGC authentic reviews," but to rapidly expand its merchant count it relaxed review moderation, allowing "users who had not visited the store" to review — sowing the seeds for the later flood of fake reviews.
(2) Profit stage (2019–2022): failed to build the "merchant-empowerment moat"
Meituan became profitable in 2019 but did not use the profits to give back to merchants: "Kuailv Purchasing" (its ingredient supply chain) covered only 70% of merchants, leaving small and medium merchants still bearing high procurement costs; it raised the annual fee for "Merchant Pass" from 50,000 to 80,000 yuan, increasing merchants' traffic costs by 60%.
(3) Ecosystem stage (2023–2025): failed to establish the "tripartite-balance moat"
In 2023, the "Regulations on Protecting the Rights and Interests of Workers in New Employment Forms" required Meituan to pay social insurance for its 7.45 million riders. This is a common cost for all platforms, and the reasonable approach is for "the platform, merchants, and users to share it." But Meituan chose to "pass all the costs onto others," leaving "users resentful, merchants suffering, riders exhausted," while it alone enjoyed the gains. Such an ecosystem simply cannot withstand a rival's impact.
More alarming still, Meituan's predicament is not an isolated case — Ctrip is repeating the same mistake. The core problem of both is exactly the same: both treat "scale" as the moat and "users / merchants" as "profit tools":
From Meituan to Ctrip, the crises of all platforms point to one truth: the survival law of platform economics has never been "scale is king" but "value is the foundation." Without "the satisfaction of users' real needs," however large the scale, it is all "quicksand."
03 The Platform Economy's Moat: User-Value Creation, Not Scale
Ctrip's "precarious state" and Meituan's "besieged situation" are not the accident of "intensified industry competition" but the inevitability of "deviating from the first principle of platform economics." All platforms must understand one underlying logic: users choose you not because "you are large-scale" but because "you can meet my needs"; merchants depend on you not because "you have lots of traffic" but because "you can help me make money." Once these two points are forgotten, however large the "moat," it will collapse — this is the "bitter lesson" Meituan and Ctrip teach all platforms.
From the Meituan and Ctrip cases, we should see more clearly: the moat of platform economics must always "start from users' / merchants' underlying needs," not "from the platform's profit goals" — this is the ultimate guidance of the first principle. Moreover, a company's strategic moat is not something you "build and finish with," but something you "must continuously iterate based on the first principle":
For Amap, the crisis always remains: if, in future commercialization, it abandons "real recommendations" and adds paid rankings, it too will repeat Meituan's mistake;
For Meituan, the opportunity has not yet vanished: if it returns to the first principle now and rebuilds trust using "Kuailv Purchasing to cut merchants' costs" and "AI technology to filter fake reviews," it still has a chance to repair its strategic moat;
Meituan's "besieged situation" is not an accident caused by external competition or regulation, but the inevitability of "ignoring user value (real recommendations, no price discrimination) during the ecosystem stage." The opportunity of Amap's street-scanning and the rise of JD's food delivery are, in essence, the "user-value gaps Meituan left for its rivals": the first principle of platform economics has never changed — in the short term you can stand on scale, cost, and competitive strategy, but in the long run those that survive are always the platforms that put "user value" at the top priority of every stage.
Future platform competition is not a contest of "technical strength" but a contest of "whether technology creates value for users / merchants" — this is the ultimate manifestation of the first principle of platform economics.
