Conclusion first: The food-delivery subsidy war has punched a genuine price gap through standardized products like Tastien’s chicken wing root bucket, and a resale chain—user provides phone number → seller stockpiles vouchers at low price → resells on Xianyu and Xiaohongshu—has already reached scale. But when you dig into the numbers down to the bedrock, the anchor case of “31 yuan buys 89-yuan goods” turns out to rest on an inflated marketing price, the widely circulated 22.8-yuan cost figure fails independent verification, and the real observable group-buy price is 27–30 yuan—leaving a pure voucher-moving margin of only 1–4 yuan per order. The endgame of this business isn’t a windfall; it’s a body of case law: pure resale sits in a gray zone that generally doesn’t trigger criminal charges, but the moment a voucher’s source touches a platform exploit or virtual-number identity fraud, sentences range from 1 year and 9 months up to 10 years and 10 months.

I. A 31-yuan business—let’s take apart the numbers

On Xianyu and Taobao, a category of shops sells Tastien’s “Tata Wing Root Bucket” (TG022) year-round: two buckets bundled for 31 yuan, with the product page marked “original price 89 yuan.” The transaction is lightweight—the buyer sends their phone number to the seller, the seller uses an official low-price channel to push vouchers into the buyer’s account, and the buyer picks up in-store with a code. No face-to-face contact at all.

The first instinct upon seeing “89 yuan vs. 31 yuan” is: the seller has secured a source below half price. But pull all publicly available price data and the first layer of foam collapses—

The “original price 89 yuan” doesn’t hold up. The public list price for a wing root bucket is 24 yuan per bucket; two buckets at the official original price come to only 48 yuan. The 89-yuan figure is closer to the marked price of a large delivery combo that includes a burger and sides—or it’s an inflated number fabricated by the seller. Marking a high original price and then advertising “65% off” is standard sales theater for these shops. Compare this to the real proxy-ordering market: a McDonald’s spicy three-piece set priced at 29.9 yuan sold for 19.9 yuan (~6.7x discount), movie tickets at 49 yuan sold for 19 yuan (~4x discount), McDonald’s proxy orders averaging –49%, KFC averaging –43%—the claimed –65% discount on “31 yuan for 89-yuan goods” clearly exceeds the normal band and matches the signature of an inflated list price.

The popular cost-side figure doesn’t hold up either. The widely circulated claim that “Meituan’s Monday special TG022 is only 11.4 yuan per bucket, so two buckets cost 22.8 yuan” serves as this business’s cost baseline. Our independent verification concluded: this number is wrong. In visible records on SMZDM and Jijizhizhi, Meituan’s “Monday Special” TG022 recent actual price is 14.8 yuan per bucket (August 2026) and 13.7 yuan per bucket (March 2026), with a historical low of approximately 13.3 yuan. The only “11.4 yuan” figure findable anywhere online dates to October 2025—that was a JD.com delivery stacked-coupon final price, and the channel doesn’t even match. If we use the independently verified Meituan channel price, the true cost of two wing root buckets is approximately 27.4–29.6 yuan, leaving a margin of only 1.4–3.6 yuan against the 31-yuan selling price.

A friend told me Meituan has a “Special Group Buy”: invite 2 new users to form a group and get 10.2 yuan per bucket. We ran multi-engine searches on this specific mechanic and found no public corroboration whatsoever—no official rules page, no news coverage, no activity screenshots. The closest publicly visible forms are: TG022 Monday Special direct purchase at 13.7–14.8 yuan per bucket (no group-buy required,随时 refundable, price fluctuates by cycle), and Pin Hao Fan’s “Double Wing Root 2-person group buy 5.9 yuan” (system auto-match, no invitation needed). The 10.2-yuan new-user group buy may be a regional or time-limited promotion, or it may be governed by real-time page rules—this article does not cite it as fact, only records it as an unverified claim.

Conservatively reconstructing the math: if sourced through standard discount channels, selling two buckets at 31 yuan yields a gross margin of 1–4 yuan—a volume business. To earn the oft-claimed “10 yuan pure profit per order,” cost would have to be pushed down to around 20 yuan, which is only reachable during extreme subsidy-coupon windows (JD.com delivery’s historical solo-meal final price of 9.9 yuan, or Taobao ShanGou multi-layer coupon stacking) or through deeper gray paths. Who’s paying for this discount is addressed later—first, let’s look at this business’s upstream: subsidies.

II. Upstream: A 50-billion-yuan price gap hammered into existence by subsidies

The precondition for this business to exist at all is that platforms are burning real money.

Taobao ShanGou is Alibaba’s instant-retail entry point, upgraded from “Xiaoshida” (hourly delivery) in April 2025 and integrating Ele.me; on December 5, 2025, the Ele.me App was fully renamed and merged in. On July 2, 2025, Taobao ShanGou launched a 12-month, 50-billion-yuan subsidy program—large red packets, free-order cards, and official subsidized flat prices. In the same period, Meituan pushed “0-yuan self-pickup coupons,” “spend 25 get 15 off”; Tastien offered “1.9 yuan for a spicy chicken leg burger”; KFC and Wallace joined the 0-yuan giveaway.

The subsidies are intended for user acquisition and re-engagement, but large-denomination coupons objectively create a price-gap space: anyone who obtains vouchers below face value can resell them. Research from Peking University Guanghua School of Management confirms that ShanGou coupons’ stimulative effect on consumption remained significant even six months later—platforms therefore keep issuing coupons, and coupons become a stockpilable, tradable quasi-asset. Stockpiling coupons has itself become a mainstream consumption pattern: since March 2025, the daily average number of transacting users in Taobao’s coupon category grew 90% year-over-year, with post-2000s users as the主力.

At the subsidy layer, two official cases directly demonstrate the real-world scale of “bulk stockpile arbitrage”:

• JD.com SuiXinTun bug incident (December 2025): A vulnerability in the coupon-stockpile product allowed users to purchase 100 vouchers, receive a full refund, and the platform only reclaimed 1 voucher while the remaining 99 stayed valid. JD.com officially acknowledged the bug and committed to the platform bearing all losses for merchants who had already fulfilled orders.
• Qianwen free-order card (February 2026): Claim a 25-yuan face-value free-order card for 1 cent; within 1–2 days of launch, large-scale reselling appeared on Xianyu at prices ranging from 1 to 12 yuan, with one seller claiming “30 in stock.” The official rules explicitly state: “Not supported for transfer, gifting, resale, or any form of monetization”; violations can result in cancellation of eligibility, freezing, or clawback of all benefits.

Note this governance landscape: issuers (brands/platforms) explicitly prohibit resale, while the circulation platform (Xianyu) has no dedicated prohibition—Xianyu customer service’s standard response to coupon resales is “no specific regulation currently; purchase is not recommended.” The gap between “prohibited” and “unenforced” is precisely where “voucher movers” survive.

III. The mechanism: Why “providing a phone number” is all it takes to freeload this chain

“Stockpile then send” (先囤后送) is a colloquial term used by users and sellers, not an official term—multi-engine searches confirm that no platform uses this name for any rules page. But the official product architecture does contain three approximate mechanisms that gray-market玩法 parasitically inhabits:

Domino’s model (phone number in order notes for voucher top-up). When you buy a Domino’s electronic voucher on Taobao, you note your “Ele.me registered phone number” in the order remarks, and the voucher is pushed directly into that account—14-day validity, auto-refund upon expiry. This means a proxy stockpiler needs only the buyer’s phone number to “send” an official low-price voucher into the buyer’s account and complete binding—zero technical barrier. This is the product-level template for “stockpile then send.” A Domino’s 9-inch dual-pizza 5-pick-2 set voucher has a face value of 36.9–39.9 yuan (original price 85 yuan), and the Meituan channel price for a single redemption voucher goes as low as 29.95 yuan—the officially authorized deep discount is itself the supply source, requiring no exploit.

Treat Card chained gifting (Taobao ShanGou). The free-order/treat cards launched in May 2025 support gifting to friends, who can continue sharing—forming a chain-style virality loop. This is the closest official mechanism to “stockpile then forward,” and is therefore the hardest-hit area for resale (see the Qianwen case).

SuiXinTun / Group-buy vouchers (JD.com, Meituan). Stockpile at low prices in advance, redeem at designated merchants,随时 refundable, auto-refund upon expiry. On the Meituan side, the delivery form is an in-store redemption code, and the code isn’t strictly bound to the purchaser—guides teach “change your location to buy cross-city, valid nationwide” (leak post), and while the official terms don’t explicitly prohibit gifting, second-hand resale disputes are frequent.

For buyers, this mechanism carries a cost that’s often overlooked: you’re handing your phone number to a stranger. Legal professionals have offered clear interpretations—providing your phone number to a proxy order-taker carries risks of personal information leakage and “take the money and ghost” scams, and legal protections for virtual-voucher transactions are inherently weaker than for physical goods.

IV. Supply side: Tutorials, tool chains, and “burned account” attrition

In-depth reporting has reconstructed this industry chain’s supply-side infrastructure, which can be summarized as a four-piece kit:

1. Sourcing: The white-market path is partnering with brands for discounted pricing; the gray-market path is “preparing large numbers of devices and phone numbers to stockpile at various time nodes”—using batched equipment and phone numbers to snipe coupons during promotional windows, with source suppliers permanently stationed in “activity intelligence channels/groups.”
2. Auto-fulfillment: Mainstream tools cost 100–200 yuan/year and integrate with Xianyu/Taobao/Xiaohongshu/official accounts to deliver pickup codes 24/7. Sellers list under disguised names to evade brand-keyword censorship—McDonald’s becomes “麦记” (MaiJi), Starbucks becomes “星咔” (XingKa).
3. Rebate chain: Tutorials disclose that the main supply source for Xianyu voucher sales is Meituan’s QuanQuan rebate platform, with a per-transaction profit margin of only 3%–8%—an H niu (Wagyu) dinner for two costs 119.48 yuan and sells for 124 yuan, earning about 5 yuan.
4. Burned-account attrition: Every proxy order consumes account reputation. After McDonald’s banned “frequent异地 ordering” anomalous accounts in May–June 2025, proxy-ordering official-account combo prices rose, and the 19.9-yuan three-piece set never returned—the cost of account bans is a real line item, not an imaginary foe.

That fantasy of “ten orders a day, 10 yuan pure profit per order, zero human intervention, fully scripted automation” runs head-on into that fourth piece. A public reference point for platform risk control: in 2024 alone, Meituan banned 30,982 rider-side accounts for using cheat-software; industry risk control has evolved from device fingerprinting to “device credit” models—device fingerprinting + behavioral analysis + IP linkage + SIM/GPS verification, plus gang-association detection and AI behavioral recognition. If new-user eligibility is bound to device or payment dimensions (the official determination criteria have never been publicly disclosed), how far can pure SMS-receiving numbers go? That’s a question with no publicly available answer—and bulk-registering to harvest new-user coupons already has precedent for criminal detention, dating back to 2019.

V. Channel side: Xianyu opens the floodgates, Xiaohongshu tightens the net

Xianyu is the main battleground. The platform officially disclosed that May Day coupon-consumption orders grew 140% year-over-year, with food-and-beverage vouchers as the largest category. Top McDonald’s proxy-ordering shops have exceeded 1 million in sales. Tastien redemption vouchers / proxy orders are also publicly traded on Taobao at approximately 7–15 yuan per order.

But the “Xianyu Community Operational Seller Definition and Management Standards” effective June 1, 2026 drew a hard line: listings >30 items, same item sold >5 times, ≥104 transactions per year, annual sales >100,000 yuan—any single criterion triggers operational-seller classification—requiring business registration and obligating seven-day no-reason returns. Bulk coupon stockpiling for resale easily triggers this. On the other side, in August 2026 Xianyu reformed its “refund-only” mechanism to no longer default to supporting buyers—previously, “refund-only freeloaders” were the top institutional risk for voucher sellers. One seller resold 659-yuan photography vouchers; the buyer applied for a refund while simultaneously redeeming that same night, and all 12 complaints were ruled with invalid evidence, leaving the seller out of pocket on both the money and the voucher.

Xiaohongshu is tightening. In October 2025, it mass-delisted/limited-traffic/banned shops engaged in virtual-product resale, with the industry attributing this to a “Xianyu-logic” style crackdown on zero-value-added搬运 (this is self-media analysis, unverified). The virtual-category security deposit is currently set at 0 yuan, but the platform reserves the right to adjust and penalize.

VI. Law: The case-law spectrum is denser than imagined

The red line drawn by judicial practice is clear: purely reselling vouchers obtained legally generally does not trigger criminal charges (though it may carry civil liability, platform penalties, or administrative violations); the precondition for criminal prosecution is that the voucher’s source is illegal or involves deception. Cases are arrayed by severity:

• Contract fraud, 5 years: Wuhan Xue Hao case (2025 verdict)—organized a crew of brushers to place orders using large delivery满减 coupons, then refund for cash extraction, nearly 100 million yuan over 8 months.
• Fraud, 10 years 10 months: Guangdong Shaoguan case—a delivery rider used 30,000+ virtual numbers to register new users and harvest new-user coupons, defrauding 410,000+ yuan in subsidies and 320,000 yuan in delivery fees.
• Fraud + teaching crime methods, 2.5 years: Jiangsu KFC case (2021)—5 university students exploited a client-side data desynchronization vulnerability to “order without paying + refund on another device” and extract vouchers, scamming 200,000+ yuan in 6 months. The key precedent in this case: the existence of a vulnerability does not exempt liability, and teaching the method itself constitutes an independent offense.
• Illegal acquisition of computer information system data: Shanghai Xuhui case (2025, arrested)—discovered a mini-program vulnerability, converted free-voucher codes into paid redemption codes, operated an online shop under the guise of “proxy ordering” and “discount voucher codes” for virtual goods, earning 10–30 yuan per order, accumulating 900,000+ yuan in illicit profit, and also wrote scripts for automated processing. This case is nearly identical in form to the anchor case, the only difference being whether the voucher source involves a vulnerability.
• Fraud, 15-person chain: Shanghai Putuo Ele.me case (2025, arrested)—intruded into the backend to purchase 118,000 sets of taken-down vouchers, bought at 17.9 yuan, sold at 22 yuan, with downstream brushers performing fake redemptions, profiting nearly 60 yuan per set.
• Civil damages, 300,000 yuan: Haidilao voucher resale case—Zhu某 collected 20–30 member accounts for a “proxy payment” business, selling over 60,000 orders through an online shop. The Hangzhou Yuhang court ruled it constituted unfair competition (multi-source reporting; the verification round was unable to directly confirm the original judgment, unverified).
• Additionally, a Shanxi Evening News report about “3 people reselling food-delivery coupons, earning 10,000 yuan/month, criminally detained”—the verification round could not cross-validate any matching police bulletin or court judgment—overall unverified. The closest Shanxi case on record is from Taiyuan in 2022: one individual purchased consumer coupons at 1.5–4.5x discounts and resold them, profiting 3,000+ yuan, sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention for reselling negotiable instruments/vouchers.

Buyer-side risk is also real: legal interpretations hold that once a voucher code is delivered and bound, delivery is deemed complete; a buyer who applies for “refund-only” but still redeems may be liable for conversion or even fraud—though platform dispute resolution often sides with the buyer for refunds, leaving the seller with high维权 costs.

VII. Who’s paying for the discount

The economic truth of this business is: voucher movers aren’t “stealing” money from platforms—they’re siphoning off subsidies that were meant to reach end-user new customers.

In the subsidy cost-sharing structure, aside from ultra-large-denomination coupons where the platform bears the majority, most coupons’ costs are borne by merchants (per media calculations; specific cost-sharing details were not independently verified). The estimate that roughly 70% of Meituan’s神券 costs fall on merchants points in the same direction—one Chengdu hand-torn noodle shop founder claims their average loss per delivery order is 1 yuan and has exited the delivery platform entirely. The economic perspective (Professor Li Sanxi, Renmin University of China): proxy ordering breaks the “consumers cannot arbitrage” precondition that price discrimination requires, causing discount costs to be averaged onto information-disadvantaged full-price consumers.

The subsidy cycle itself is receding: in 2025 Meituan’s projected loss was in the 23.3–24.3 billion range; by 2026 losses narrowed to the 6.5 billion range; in January 2026 the State Administration for Market Regulation classified the food-delivery “subsidy war” as a典型案例 of “involution-style” competition to be rectified and summoned platforms for talks. Subsidies thin out, and so does the price gap—and all players’ profits along this chain are entirely parasitic on that gap.

VIII. Risk map and endgame

Back to the original question: is this a business worth doing? Put the verified numbers together—real gross margin of 1–4 yuan per order (standard discount channels), or “10 yuan per order” (which necessarily depends on gray-market voucher sources, corresponding to the Shanghai Xuhui case’s 900,000-yuan profit and arrest for illegal acquisition of computer information system data); risk-control account bans are a routine attrition cost, Xianyu operational-seller classification is tightening, the subsidy window is closing, and case-law density is rising.

What this business most resembles is the shadow of a subsidy: the thicker the subsidy, the longer the shadow. The 50 billion yuan poured in during 2025 cast a shadow that dragged on for two years; as subsidies recede in 2026, the shadow is shrinking. And for the people on this industry chain, the real question was never “can it be automated”—it’s: when the subsidy tide goes out, are you holding vouchers, or the starting point of a prison sentence?

Research methodology: This article was produced by 39 parallel research subtasks (6 search engines cross-scanned for sourcing → thematic deep-reading → adversarial dual-source verification of 10 key claims → gap-filling → synthesis), from 107 sourced claims and 116 deep-read facts in the raw materials. Claims that were overturned (the widely circulated 11.4-yuan cost baseline) have been treated as debunked rumor and are not used as factual data. Core case precedents and price data all carry traceable sources; price-type data is subject to real-time platform pages—“per third-party guide” labels indicate guide-level second-hand information.