128 yuan. That was Zhang Jing's first income as a cleaner five years ago. In Beijing, she earned this amount after completing an initial cleaning for a two-bedroom apartment belonging to a man living alone. She is from Heilongjiang, 43 years old, and had just arrived in Beijing not long before, renting a place with her husband in Majuqiao. By all accounts, her first paycheck in Beijing should have been cause for celebration, but after leaving the client's home, Zhang Jing walked alone to the banks of the Liangshui River and wept.
"Why have I fallen to this point?" she wondered, her emotions tangled. This middle-aged woman had once run a restaurant and sold clothing back home, earning a decent income. But due to family upheaval and her son's admission to a school in Tianjin, she and her husband left Northeast China to seek work in Beijing, hoping to be closer to their son. Cleaning was not her first choice of work. In her simple worldview, it meant being treated poorly and lacking dignity. But with only an elementary school education and repeated rejections in Beijing's job market, she took her first cleaning assignment out of sheer defiance — "I refuse to believe I can't find work." Yet the moment that first payment arrived, the dramatic shift in her identity became concrete, piercing her deeply. Still, her son was in school, and aside from persevering, she seemed to have no other choice.
That was early 2021. Most people, Zhang Jing included, never anticipated that service consumption would take the baton from goods consumption and become a hot track just a few years later. More and more people are growing accustomed to paying for services. Housework goes to cleaners, seasonal organization goes to professional organizers, care for bedridden elderly goes to visiting nurses, and pet feeding is arranged before business trips... Many services surprise people — "They have this service?!" — yet everyone readily accepts that money should be spent on improving quality of life. During this year's Double 11 shopping festival, many consumers spent even more on service consumption than on goods — "stocking up on housekeepers" became a buzzword in consumption.
However, unlike the maturity of goods consumption, service consumption still feels somewhat like "opening a blind box": at the moment of placing an order, it's hard to predict satisfaction with the experience. If unsatisfied, how does after-sales service work? Trust has become the biggest cost constraining service consumption. This is also a pressing question for today's consumer market. Goods consumption growth is approaching saturation, and as the proportion of service consumption gradually rises, what will it rely on to scale up?
"Non-Standard" Is Not the Root Cause
Let's look at a recent real case. At the end of September this year, Ms. Lin in Beijing moved and hired the currently popular Japanese-style organizing service. The company, based on her needs, arranged two organizers for a 4-hour home visit — but the actual service took 10 hours. More importantly, Ms. Lin discovered that the two organizers spent 6 hours organizing the wardrobe, while the living and dining area, which had the most clutter and was the most troublesome to organize, was ultimately not completed. After the service ended and the organizers left, Ms. Lin inspected the results carefully and became even angrier: one drawer mixed clothing from a family of three, winter and summer clothes were stored together, "completely ignoring real-life needs." The dining room cabinets were organized with no logic whatsoever. "Over a thousand yuan, and I bought myself a lesson. They only did superficial work just so their photos would look good." Discouraged, she ultimately chose to organize and store things slowly herself.
Similar incidents abound on social platforms. Calling for home repairs, a check valve that costs just dozens of yuan on the market was charged at 400 yuan; for drain unclogging, an online agreement confirmed a flat rate of 80 yuan, but the technician added 380 yuan on-site and even watched the customer write a positive review with photos before leaving. For these long-standing problems, the industry habitually attributes the cause to one thing: service consumption is non-standard.
This is indeed the core difference between service consumption and goods consumption. Goods have parameter standards, are storable, and the entire consumption process is more controllable. Even for non-standard goods like fresh produce or handmade items, users can apply for after-sales service relatively easily. Services, however, are intangible, with production and consumption happening simultaneously. There are numerous uncertainties in the consumption process, such as the skill and ethical standards of service personnel, and each order's service needs are unique. But to conclude from this that people must accept the "blind box" nature of service consumption is somewhat of a "passing the buck" move. The reason closer to business essence should be cost. In other words, establishing a standardized system for service consumption and strictly enforcing it is not cost-effective.
In service consumption tracks like housekeeping, organizing, and home repairs, the mainstream model for many years has been the intermediary system: the platform charges a referral fee, introduces the housekeeper to the client, and after that, service quality basically depends on luck. Ms. Lin learned during casual conversation with the organizers that they take orders through WeChat groups, essentially gig workers, with no fixed labor contract with the intermediary company. The company takes a cut from orders but provides no training to service personnel. This is indeed a more economical shortcut. During this period, the intermediary company or platform only handles matchmaking, takes a commission, and does not bear training and management costs — essentially earning guaranteed income regardless of drought or flood. But in the long run, this limits industry development: consumers dare not place orders with confidence, and service personnel's income is not guaranteed.
On major complaint platforms, the number of complaints about arbitrary charges, excessive repairs, and difficult after-sales service in consumption services remains consistently high. The biggest pain point is also the biggest business opportunity. Just as it did with logistics for over twenty years, JD.com (NASDAQ: JD) chose to enter with a self-operated model: hiring its own people, conducting its own training, and managing itself. Currently, JD.com Services has established two major business segments: life services and production services. Among them, life services cover the three main consumer scenarios of home, travel, and health. In addition to widely accepted services like express delivery, car maintenance, and medicine delivery, the business focus is also on elderly care services, AI services, and pet services.
Self-operation often means transferring external costs internally. Take vocational training, which service personnel originally had to pay for themselves. JD.com has now built the world's largest blue-collar training system, leading in self-training base scale, number of trainees, and self-developed categories. To date, JD.com has trained over one million blue-collar workers cumulatively, with plans to train another million in the next three years. During training, JD.com bears all labor costs. For example, when couriers transition to robot maintenance, they often undergo dozens of days of full-time study, during which their salaries continue to be paid.
However, JD.com's choice is not surprising. Self-operation means full controllability, and cost compression is substantial — something JD.com excels at. When it built its own logistics in 2007, it was mocked as "too heavy." By 2025, logistics fulfillment costs had been compressed to around 6%, half the average cost of socialized logistics. That heavy investment has become a moat of "certainty."
The trend of service consumption exploding was already evident during this year's JD.com 11.11 promotion. Data shows that JD.com generated 150 million service orders in the first half of 11.11, with categories like housekeeping and cleaning, home appliance cleaning, car maintenance, pet home feeding, health checkups, moving, and partial renovations leading service consumption. On the first "Super Service Day" on October 28, the "3-hour cleaning 26-session family bucket" became the day's top-selling service product. "Weekly cleaning is a fixed need for my family," one buyer told us. Over the past two years, she has gradually reduced spending on clothing and allocated more budget to improving life experiences, such as hiring cleaners, buying health checkup cards, and regularly cleaning home appliances.
Changed Mindsets
Zhang Jing is very busy now. In March 2023, she was selected from over 3,000 JD.com cleaners across Beijing to become one of the first six hands-on instructors. Now, her "workplace" has shifted from clients' homes to JD.com Housekeeping's training classroom, and she frequently travels nationwide to give lectures. This gives her a great sense of accomplishment. She pays attention to detail and loves sharing, breaking down housekeeping processes in class, explaining what should be done and why. Take vanity organization as an example: the most reasonable approach is to categorize by frequency of use, with frequently used items placed outward to prevent clients from knocking over other items when reaching.
She also decides class content based on trainees' situations. "Some detailed standards aren't taught in newcomer classes; they're more effective during 30-day/60-day training when trainees have a grasp of real scenarios and are more receptive." A mature JD.com housekeeping staff member must participate in at least four rounds of training during their career: first the newcomer class, then continued training at 30/60/90 days after joining. If a client gives a negative review and it's confirmed to be an operational issue, the service personnel must attend retraining. More importantly, these trainings are free for service personnel.
Often, Zhang Jing sees her former self in trainees: middle-aged people bearing the responsibility of supporting a family. She tries her best to teach well, as if helping her former self. Zhang Jing only truly found confidence in her work in her third month. In the first two months, she hadn't even bought an electric bike — she didn't want to invest in vain and waste money. She relied on shared bikes to run orders, sometimes traveling over ten kilometers one way. By the third month, she gradually built up regular clients and spent 2,700 yuan on a red electric bike to match her red uniform. By the fifth month, her income exceeded 10,000 yuan. After that, she entered a new career ascent: from mentor to team leader, then to hands-on instructor.
JD.com Housekeeping continues to expand to new cities, and she clearly senses the industry heating up from the podium. When teaching in Shenzhen, she found trainees were generally younger, many in their twenties or thirties, with associate's or even bachelor's degrees. Through conversations, she learned that the core reason these young people chose the housekeeping industry was the ability to quickly achieve a monthly income over 10,000 yuan. Nevertheless, when her son announced in August 2025 that he wanted to join JD.com for home appliance cleaning, Zhang Jing exploded. "I know deeply how hard this industry is," she said. She had also encountered clients who took out their frustrations on her because of other matters, and she didn't want her son to experience that. Her son has an associate's degree in dental nursing, and she preferred he work in a dental clinic. But her son calculated the economics for her, clearly concluding that "home appliance cleaning earns more." In the end, Zhang Jing compromised.
Six months later, due to zero negative reviews and zero property damage, her son advanced to become a mentor. Recently, he has also been preparing for an instructor interview — following his mother's career path once again. From 2021 to 2026, over five years, service consumption has been rapidly exploding in both scale and variety. Both consumers and practitioners are viewing it with a more rational attitude. Consumers calculate whether the services they pay for are worth it, and practitioners have reversed their concerns about "occupational hierarchy" through income and user recognition, considering it a normal job. This is also one of the signs of the industry maturing.
In JD.com's service system, the story of Zhang Jing and her son is not unique. Sun Yilong, 50, has worked in JD.com logistics for ten years — as a courier, station manager, and warehouse keeper. This summer, training for the first batch of frontline employees transitioning to robot maintenance engineers began. HR asked if he wanted to participate, and he agreed the same day. The training was in Dezhou, Shandong, over 300 kilometers from home, and he was the only one from the entire province to sign up. At 50, becoming a student again, practicing from unscrewing bolts and memorizing component positions over and over. "After fixing something, there's a great sense of accomplishment," he said. For him, this wasn't starting from zero. Before joining JD.com, he had worked at a network communications company for nearly 8 years and had always been interested in computers and repairs. After going in circles, JD.com's vocational training brought him back to his favorite field.
There are many more stories: Cheng Chong, who has years of experience at a military tertiary hospital, joined JD.com Nurse to Home in October 2024. To date, her platform service orders exceed 3,600, and she serves as the Beijing regional station chief of JD.com Nurse to Home's home care group. Among her clients is a 62-year-old man who needs long-term medication and venous catheter maintenance after a leukemia transplant. Over more than 100 home visits, Cheng Chong's professional nursing skills and warm service have earned the elderly man's full recognition. Now, she is more like the couple's goddaughter, and they always warmly invite her to stay for meals during home visits.
These people's common career turning point is the standardized training system provided by JD.com Services. Data shows that JD.com Housekeeping established a career growth pathway in 2021, with over 5,000 service personnel nationwide developing within this system; on the logistics side, it promotes "multi-skilled workers," with the average skill tags per engineer increasing from 0.9 to 2.7; car maintenance sets one-to-five-star certifications for technicians, and only those with project badges have order-taking permissions. The most valuable characteristic of standardization is replicability.
This 11.11, JD.com Services upgraded its accumulated rich experience into the "333" standard system, addressing three major pain points — opaque pricing, inconsistent processes, and no after-sales guarantee — by establishing three major standards: price transparency, service specifications, and after-sales protection, providing the industry with a standardized manual of reference value. Before this, JD.com Housekeeping participated in drafting Beijing's special vocational ability assessment standards, with 3 of the first 7 modules written by JD.com, and related textbooks also compiled and published by JD.com — to some extent, JD.com standards are becoming Beijing's industry standards.
Additionally, the integration of industry and education is also reserving talent for the industry. JD.com Car Maintenance has partnered with sixty to seventy schools to run order-based classes, with 100% of graduates placed in employment and a six-month retention rate exceeding 70%; couriers and warehouse keepers undergo dozens of days of full-time training to transition to robot maintenance engineers, with the first batch already certified and on duty at certification centers in Zhuozhou and other locations.
Clear and executable standards, and a sufficient volume of professional talent — these are necessary prerequisites for the revitalization of service consumption.
A Positive Cycle Between Supply and Demand
From the data, we are on the eve of a service consumption surge. In 2025, China's per capita service consumption expenditure as a proportion of total consumption expenditure reached 46.1%, approaching "half the kingdom." International experience shows that after per capita GDP crosses the $15,000 threshold, consumption structure will accelerate from goods-dominated to service-dominated. China's per capita GDP in 2025 is approximately $14,000, and is expected to reach $16,000 in 2026. Service consumption is leading the charge in driving consumption growth. But its scaled development still requires more consensus.
Compared with goods consumption, standardization is the most fundamental prerequisite for industry development. It includes not only the standardization of various product parameters but, more importantly, the standardization of the supply chain — which most directly affects user experience and constitutes e-commerce platforms' differentiation. In an era of extremely abundant goods supply, products themselves can hardly constitute competitiveness alone, because behind them is a mature, industrialized, scaled production system, and most products are listed on multiple platforms. At this point, user experience supported by the supply chain becomes a more important competitive dimension. After placing an order, whether users receive guaranteed product quality, sufficiently favorable prices, and worry-free pre-sale and after-sale service directly affects their willingness to repurchase.
In contrast, the formula for service consumption is more complex. It is an intangible experience product, with production and consumption often occurring simultaneously, highly dependent on human performance. Moreover, limited by the time and space constraints of services, economies of scale are difficult to achieve in service consumption, meaning supply platforms in this space cannot take shortcuts. Applying the logic of "low prices, high volume, thin profits" to the service industry will only harm both sides: service providers' income is squeezed thin, and service quality is diluted. Therefore, the scaling of service supply must shift its logic from "amplifying capacity" to "managing certainty."
Specifically, a good service consumption experience requires standardization, supply chain, and trust to work in coordination. Among them, the investment required for the three increases progressively: a standardization system can be distilled from experience; supply chain construction mainly involves human fulfillment systems, evaluation systems, and long-term user relationship management; and the formation of trust is more complex — it requires institutional guarantees and, more importantly, human understanding and execution.
Some examples can serve as references. Hati, a young man born in the 2000s, stands 1.8 meters tall, graduated in elderly care, and is now a home-based elderly care provider at JD.com Housekeeping. This is a position with a huge shortage. Nationwide, there are over 40 million disabled and semi-disabled elderly people; normal supply-demand ratios indicate a need for up to 6 million elderly care workers, while there are currently only about 500,000 practitioners. One of Hati's important tasks is helping elderly people bathe. An 85-year-old man who hadn't bathed in over four years was satisfied with his service and warmly invited him to stay for a meal, even hoping he would stay longer; he served an elderly person with Alzheimer's disease and was scratched until his arm was covered in blood the first visit. He refused the family's compensation: "The elderly person didn't mean it." Later visits — the elderly person no longer lashed out and even remembered him. Another elderly person he visited 36 times in one year, essentially becoming family. They often chatted, and during Spring Festival, the elderly person even wrote him a poem as a New Year's greeting.
These examples show that standardized processes and supply chains form the foundation of the service consumption market. But building market scale is inseparable from the trust constructed in these fragmented daily moments. Because in service consumption, trust is the core prerequisite for both first attempts and repeat purchases. Based on trust, service orders will persist long-term. When users have certain experiences, service providers have certain labor income, and platforms have certain supply capabilities, the positive cycle between supply and demand can run, and market scale can truly be established.
"With guaranteed income, we have confidence in our work," Zhang Jing said. JD.com's self-operated model gives service personnel a greater sense of security, eliminating worries about the platform withholding wages or operating unstably. Therefore, they are more motivated to do well in every service order. Among the clients they encounter, many initially place orders simply because they trust the JD.com brand, and after being satisfied with the service experience, they continue to repurchase, building deeper trust.
More changes are unfolding. More people are getting used to paying for service consumption, and the increase in urban pet-owning families and the aging population is bringing more segmented service demands. On the supply side, more standardization efforts represented by JD.com Services' "333" standard system are being implemented, more practitioners are entering, and the entire industry is releasing the tension of rapid growth.
Zhang Jing still thanks her first client. Standing in a grease-covered kitchen, discovering that no matter how she wiped, it wouldn't come off, she was once very nervous, her hands trembling. The client, learning she was new, proactively offered to go downstairs first, leaving her alone at home to clean, to reduce her pressure. She successfully completed her first order, didn't disgrace JD.com's reputation, and thus began her new life in Beijing. Standing on the eve of a market explosion, Zhang Jing feels very grounded. This is her sixth year in Beijing, and her family's monthly income has stabilized above 20,000 yuan. She still lives in Majuqiao, renting a 700-yuan single room with her husband, while her son and girlfriend rent a 1,200-yuan single room with a private bathroom. She is working hard to save money, planning to buy a home for her son in Tianjin or Yanjiao in 2-3 years, giving him a stable home. When ordinary people's efforts align with the market's progress, people's confidence in the future has a basis.
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