While its competition is still just talking about it, online retailer Alibaba is using remotely-controlled drones to deliver packages by air to its customers.

Alibaba offered air deliveries by drone within an hour to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou from February 4 to 6. The catch? You had to order a certain brand of tea. There was one other restriction too: each city was restricted to just 50 deliveries a day.

The airspace in China is tightly controlled and mostly reserved for military use. Last year, civilian air travel in the east of China was restricted as airports were shut down to allow military air drills.

Having found its “open sesame” to China’s locked skies, Alibaba beat out international competitor Amazon, which was planning to make similar deliveries using unmanned drones until US authorities stepped in.

Although the notoriety of Alibaba is still soaring from its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, the drone delivery campaign comes at an awkward time. Last week, government regulators criticized Alibaba for “illegal” acts, such as allowing counterfeit goods to be sold on its site, something to which CEO Jack Ma angrily denounced in a rare display of defiance against authority.

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Jeremy Blum in the South China Morning Post reports this morning that SF Express, a delivery company based in Shenzhen, is testing out drones to deliver packages in Dongguan.

The vehicles have eight propellers and have their destination address and flight path set by via a computer. Then the person at mission control can sit back and monitor the drone as it flies up to an altitude of 100 metres to get to the customer.  As you can see from the photos below, the packages are held on a tray underneath the drone. One assumes these things aren’t flying in extreme weather.

SCMP has more:

While SF Express’ drone project is still in early stages of development without an announced date of completion, the concept of automated machines delivering packages was enough to entice curiosity from several Chinese online readers. Most commentators who read the story on MyDrivers.com commented that the idea was “creative and had potential,” but the drones currently being tested were “too small” and seemed “only capable of delivering one package at a time.”

Those are good points. There’s no way one of these things, as currently constructed, could deliver something like a computer or television. But the technology is promising, and if it works the sky could soon be filled with packages flying hither and yon.

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