Ordering food delivery in China as a foreigner

Food delivery in mainland China runs on two platforms. One is Meituan, whose delivery service is 美团外卖. The other is the app that most guides still call Ele.me, and it changed name. Alibaba Group’s own English page for the business states that “Ele.me was fully acquired by Alibaba Group in 2018 and was rebranded as Taobao Instant Commerce in December 2025” (Alibaba Group, read 2026-10-12). The ele.me domain serves that brand, and the company’s own milestone page carries the Chinese version of the same event — 饿了么加入阿里电商事业群，品牌全面焕新为淘宝闪购 (milestone page, read 2026-10-12). Its App Store listing is titled 淘宝闪购 and still prints 饿了么 in the product text (App Store, read 2026-10-12).

Both platforms publish the rules that bind an account holder. Neither publishes a guide written for a visitor that I could find. Everything below comes from the companies’ own terms and rule pages, the parent company’s pages, or Chinese government pages that walk through the same steps in English. I did not place an order for this page, and no account of mine appears in it.

What the platforms require before an order exists

Meituan’s delivery privacy policy, updated 2026-08-26 and effective 2026-09-02, is the platform’s own statement of what it collects. Its food-delivery section names the necessary items and the payment partners in the same document.

The Meituan wording is “a phone number”. It is not “a mainland phone number”, and I found no page from either company stating whether a non-mainland number passes that SMS step. The company’s own privacy policy is silent on nationality, and so is the Shanghai walkthrough.

The Ele.me agreement is the one place where a route for a visitor is written down in the platform’s own words. Its tenth article says that a user who enters the Ele.me application inside Alipay and agrees to the Alipay authorisation has an Ele.me account registered automatically with the Alipay-bound phone number. That matters because Alipay’s own terms for foreign users do not require a Chinese number: a Shanghai government FAQ published 2023-12-11, sourced to Alipay’s official account, says the registration and verification steps were simplified and the “necessity of establishing a prepaid account or obtaining a Chinese phone number” was removed (Shanghai government, 2023-12-11).

The same policy puts the delivery surfaces beyond the app itself. Meituan operates the service through its website, its app, and “related WeChat open-platform accounts or mini programs”, which is the company’s own description of the mini-program channel.

Paying

Meituan’s privacy policy lists the payment services its checkout hands off to: Meituan Pay and its affiliates, or third-party partners WeChat Pay, QQ Wallet, Apple Pay and Alipay. Identity documents, including copies, appear in that policy only in the paragraph on financial products such as lending, wealth management and insurance, which are covered by separate agreements.

Shanghai’s walkthrough, updated 2026-07-24, prints the menu a user sees in the Meituan app: Alipay, WeChat Pay, or the Digital RMB wallet.

Nothing on either delivery platform’s pages says a foreign card can pay a delivery order directly. The card enters through a wallet. The national guide published by the central bank shows the two wallets registering with a country or region chosen from a list and a mobile number entered, and it prints English service hotlines for both. What those wallets allow on a foreign card, and what they charge, is set out in the companion piece on paying in China.

Language, as declared and as described

Apple’s storefront shows a language field per app, filled in by the publisher. On the United States storefront on 2026-10-12 the three listings read as follows.

A publisher declaration is not a product page. No Meituan or Taobao Instant Commerce page I could read documents a language setting inside either app, and I could not run the apps to look for one.

Meituan’s corporate site is a different matter. It offers a language switcher, and its English page for the company loads at the /en-US path (Meituan, read 2026-10-12). The shorter /en path returned “Not Found” on the same day. That page describes the group, not the delivery service.

Shanghai’s walkthrough tells readers what to expect on the other platform. It says that on Taobao Flash Shopping “many restaurants popular among expats are foreigner-friendly and include English translations”, that menus otherwise carry photographs, and that a translator app can be used. The same page walks through adding a delivery address, with road, building and floor or flat number, and a note field for the restaurant or the rider.

Delivery fee and minimum order

Meituan’s own rule on this is one page in its rules centre, titled 美团外卖配送费说明, with no printed date on the page I read (Meituan rules centre, read 2026-10-12). It states the mechanics and no amounts.

• Three delivery products exist — 专送, 快送 and 全城送 — and they are priced independently of one another, because their range and service level differ.
• The fee is affected by delivery distance, difficulty, time slot, weather, capacity and the goods themselves, including quantity and price.
• Cities differ, because local economic level and geography differ.
• The fee shown on a merchant page or an item page is an estimate; the fee shown on the order settlement page is the one charged.
• After discounts, if the order price falls to zero, the delivery fee charged is a minimum of 0.01 yuan.

The same company states a minimum order for one product in the publisher text of its app listing: the delivery product called 美团拼好饭 is described there as “0 delivery fee, no minimum order” (App Store, read 2026-10-12).

On the Alibaba side the minimum order is described in a developer document rather than a consumer page. The Ele.me open-platform documentation says that for users, “the platform sets a minimum order for most restaurants in order to balance delivery cost”, and that a higher minimum “damages the user experience and blocks part of the orders” (Ele.me open platform, no printed date, read 2026-10-12). The document then sets out the mechanism for restaurants that drop the minimum to zero: the delivery fee is charged in tiers by order value, with distance and late-night surcharges on top, and the merchant may absorb part of the base fee itself. It prints the tiers twice, with different thresholds — 7 yuan, 5 yuan and free at 0, 20 and 50 yuan in the strategy text, and at 0, 30 and 70 yuan in the worked example for a merchant who absorbs 1 yuan. Both are the document’s illustrations, not a rate card.

So the published rules give the inputs and the direction of the arithmetic. Neither platform publishes a rate table by city, and neither publishes a minimum order by merchant. Both appear at the point of ordering.

Help, and which language it answers in

The payment side publishes English lines. The delivery side publishes a telephone number for callers outside the mainland and no English help pages that I found.

The Meituan hotline page lists an overseas consumer number beside its mainland numbers, and a second overseas line, (+86) 311-8654-7097, for a different service. Which product each line covers, and whether the overseas ones answer in English, is not stated on the page. Taobao Flash Purchase’s own site lists an online customer-service entry and a complaint line for illegal and harmful information, 10105757, in Chinese (ele.me, read 2026-10-12).

How I checked this

All pages were read on 2026-10-12 unless a date is given beside the figure. Sources are first-party or governmental: Meituan’s rules centre, including the delivery privacy policy updated 2026-08-26 and the delivery-fee rule; Meituan’s service-hotline and corporate pages; the Ele.me consumer agreement, its open-platform documentation and the ele.me site; Alibaba Group’s English business page; two Shanghai government pages, one of them quoting Alipay’s own account; the central bank’s Guide to Payment Services in China, whose PDF file metadata reads 2025-08-05; and Apple’s storefront pages, whose language and description fields are supplied by the publisher.

Two pages print no date: Meituan’s delivery-fee rule and Ele.me’s consumer agreement. I say so where each is cited rather than assigning them one.

What I could not do: install or open either app, so every in-app claim here is either the platform’s own published text or a government page describing the same screens. No page I could read shows the country-code list on either registration form. Apple’s language field is the only English-related claim about the apps that a company is on the record for.

What I could not check

• Whether a non-mainland mobile number registers on either platform. No page from Meituan or Taobao Instant Commerce states this, in either direction. Registration as printed by both companies needs only “a phone number”.
• Whether either app has a language switch inside it. The App Store language lists are publisher declarations; the platforms document no setting, and I opened neither app.
• Foreign-card acceptance on a delivery order itself. The delivery platforms name Alipay and WeChat Pay; the wallets name the card brands. No page states that the delivery checkout takes a card without a wallet.
• Whether a foreign number or a foreign card changes prices. One App Store review dated 6 November 2023 claims prices doubled for foreign numbers and that Alipay had stopped being a payment option in that app (App Store, read 2026-10-12). It is a user review, so it is not evidence. No company page addresses it.
• Any delivery fee or minimum order in numbers for a place. Meituan gives inputs and an estimate-versus-final rule; Ele.me’s tier example is illustrative. No published table by city or by merchant exists that I could find.
• Which hotline answers in English. The payment lines are labelled English by the central bank’s guide. Meituan’s overseas line is not labelled by language.
• The date of Ele.me’s consumer agreement. The page prints none, and it is the revised version of an older agreement, so the Alipay auto-registration clause carries no date I can cite.
• Anything about my own orders or accounts. Deliberately absent. No order was placed for this page.