(Yicai Global) Jan. 15 -- Guangdong-based supermarket chain Renrenle Commercial Group Co. [SHE:002336] and JD.com Inc. [NASDAQ:JD] have formally entered into a partnership, with 41 Renrenle stores starting operations on JD Daojia, an offline-to-online logistics service platform affiliated to the Beijing-based e-commerce giant, the two announced today.

The pair has integrated operating systems and management workflows under the partnership, and each Renrenle store has set aside a 30-square-meter courier pick-up area reserved for processing orders received from JD Daojia, 36kr.com reported today. The pair has also optimized order fulfillment and delivery workflows.

The first Renrenle-Daojia store opened on Dec. 1, and 40 more stores have debuted since then. All occupy prime locations in such major Chinese cities as Shenzhen, Tianjin, Xi'an and Chengdu. Another 21 stores in Changsha, Chongqing and Guangzhou will join the O2O platform before the Chinese New Year (Feb. 15).

The weekly volume of online orders had increased 79-fold by last week since the first Daojia store opened on Dec. 1, and the average order pick-up efficiency had doubled in dedicated Daojia goods depots. JD Daojia has around four million couriers, and its service network extends over more than one million supermarkets, grocery and snack retailers, florists and pharmacies and close to 50 million consumers in more than 370 major Chinese cities.