According to Alibaba the China's biggest internet retailer says it has begun testing drone-based deliveries to hundreds of customers.
It says the trial will last three days and be limited to areas within a one-hour flight of its distribution centres in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Amazon, Google and parcel service UPS are among other companies carrying out more private trials of such aircraft.
Alibaba is using its drones to deliver orders for a specific type of ginger tea, helping limit the maximum weight of the packages to 340g
(12oz).
The Tech in Asia blog, which was one of the first to report the development, said the experiment was being undertaken by Alibaba's
Taobao division - an eBay-like marketplace that connects third-party sellers and buyers - and would involve 450 shoppers.
"Even though it's very limited in scope, Taobao is delivering real goods to real people, which is a step further than its Western counterpart
Amazon has gone," Tech in Asia's Paul Bischoff told the BBC.
"That said, which company will actually roll out a fully functioning drone-based delivery service
remains to be seen and [such a deployment] is still a long way off."
In 2013, a much smaller Chinese company - the InCake bakery - began delivering cakes to customers in Shanghai using remote-controlled
drones. However, the trade was quickly halted by a local aviation watchdog, for operating without a licence.
Safety concerns Alibaba's founder, Jack Ma, has said he aims to expand his company's operations across the globe in order to reach a target of having two billion customers by 2025.
In 2014, the company raised a record $25bn (£16.4bn) when it listed its shares on the New
York Stock Exchange.
However, its ambitions were threatened last week by a high-profile spat with one of China's
regulators, which alleged that Alibaba had not done enough to tackle the sale of counterfeit
goods on Taobao, letting this "abscess fester until it became a danger".
The tests provide Taobao with a chance to generate more positive headlines.
But one expert said it would be wrong to dismiss them as a PR stunt, even if drone- based deliveries were still years away from becoming the norm.
"It's well established that drones can be flown autonomously above the tree-line - but below it, there are still a lot of issues," said Ravi Vaidyanathan, a robotics lecturer at Imperial College London.
"They will need to get around moving obstacles like children and pets when they come to land below the roof of your house. And
the kind of co-ordination it would take to get airspace reserved for drone flights is also a big issue too.
"I don't think these problems are
insurmountable, but the safety considerations must be addressed, and obstacle-free take-off
and landing zones may need to be considered in the near term."
A video released by Alibaba indicates it will use quadcopter drones that fly far beyond the
sightlines of their operators, travelling over roads, rivers and buildings before landing in
open spaces close to apartment blocks.
However, the company has not provided technical details abut how it intends to achieve this.
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