LinkedIn post:
Meituan enters the U.S. market – through the backdoor… or the front gate?
In the past weeks, I wrote quite a bit about the Chinese giant (their new ads strategy https://lnkd.in/d9Jj7Gmw and challenges in the home market https://lnkd.in/dUmtysm7). Next, I was actually planning to write about their POS solution but yesterday I came across Joe Guszkowski’s post on their U.S. entry. And apparetly they decided to do it via their POS Peppr. How fun!
Meituan is one of China’s largest platforms, often called a “super-app.” It runs food delivery, local services, travel, retail and more, serving around 770 million users annually and working with over 1 million restaurants in China.
In the U.S., instead of launching delivery, Meituan is entering with Peppr, a POS and marketing solution. Their flagship product is Peppr Grow – a POS bundled with marketing tools, loyalty, and online ordering.
I love digging into companies’ blogs to better learn something about their intentions, so here I did it again: post after post is framed as a direct comparison: Peppr vs Toast, Peppr vs Square, Peppr vs Lightspeed, Peppr vs Clover, Peppr vs Aloha. This content is designed to own the search surface for the most common decision queries in this category: “Which POS should I pick,” “Toast alternative,” “best POS for small restaurants.”
Obviously, they are optimizing not just for Google but for AI prompts and with their mother company owns an LLM model (https://lnkd.in/dHpsCciQ) they should be good at that.
Around direct comparisons with competition, Peppr fills the funnel with long-tail queries: “How to increase sales without ads,” “How to run restaurant promotions,” “Checklist for opening a restaurant.” These capture new operators at the very top of their journey, and make Peppr present not only when you already know you want POS, but when you’re still figuring out how to run your restaurant.
Their Facebook ads (they’ve just started with them and only have two running) keep the same theme.
On LinkedIn, Peppr already lists 67 U.S. employees, with headcount growing more than 1,000% over two years.
The thesis is that Meituan is planting roots by starting with independents, and they’re using POS as the wedge.
Will see if they succeed and what will follow.
Sources: Joe Guszkowski (Restaurant Business Online), Peppr blog, Peppr ads, LinkedIn company data.