Checkout pages now give Chinese model makers a mass consumer sales channel, but token use for the same text varies by up to 50% across models, clouding price comparisons.
Alibaba’s Tmall is presenting AI usage as an ordinary retail purchase on the eve of China’s Singles’ Day. Si Dengyu, Tmall’s general manager for 3C digital products, told China News Service that shoppers had been searching the platform for suitable token plans, so Tmall put them into its standard checkout system for consumers to buy "like topping up phone credit or buying a membership." The report, republished on November 10 by 21st Century Business Herald, said transaction value in Taobao’s token category (词元) rose 450% month on month on the first day of the festival’s sales.
The same report gave the first concrete festival prices. On November 5, a Qwen AI Lite monthly card listed at 60 yuan on its official site sold for 19.5 yuan on an e-commerce platform, and a Qoder Pro monthly card fell from 59 yuan to 19.9 yuan. Tmall opened its token recharge center on September 3 with DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu and Kimi; MiniMax opened its first official flagship store there, and QwenWork and StepFun have joined. EastFrontier reported in September that Z.ai opened a consumer sales channel on Tmall.
Alibaba gave a different window for the same growth rate to the South China Morning Post, which Alibaba owns: sales at its new AI token center rose 450% month on month between October 1 and 20. JD.com said token sales from its cloud unit rose 167% year on year in the festival’s opening phase. Neither company has disclosed how many token plans it has sold or what they earn.
Livestreams moved token packs on both Alibaba and JD.com
Livestreaming has carried much of the push. Shangyou News, in a report published on NetEase on November 10, said Li Jiaqi’s livestream on November 2 listed a QwenWork individual monthly membership at one cent and sold about 100,000 in half an hour, equal to roughly 2 trillion tokens. The same evening, JD.com’s 3C digital livestream offered more than ten token packs from JD Cloud, DeepSeek, Zhipu GLM, Volcano Seed and MiniMax. It gave away more than 1 billion tokens in its first hour, and token-pack sales rose 20-fold month on month within two hours, according to both Shangyou News and China News Service.
Xinhua described the main buyers as individuals and small businesses, including households, people using AI for study and research, and one-person companies. One Chongqing AI company director told Xinhua he spends more than 2,000 yuan a month on tokens and bought a year of Qwen memberships below the official website price.
Underneath sits fast-growing demand. China News Service cited National Data Administration figures showing daily token calls in China passed 140 trillion in March, up from 100 billion in early 2024.
AI shopping assistants still miss the checkout price
The other half of the festival’s AI story is the shopping assistant. Alibaba connected its Qwen app to the full Taobao and Tmall catalog of more than 4 billion products in May, with a 30-day price tracker that places an order when an item reaches a target price. For Singles’ Day, the Qwen app added a deals section with budget-based picks, shopping guides and product reviews, while ByteDance’s Doubao added a festival page with budget picks, coupons and product comparison, Beijing Daily reported on November 10 in a test published on Sina.
The newspaper’s results were mixed. Asked where a bottle of liquor and a cosmetic product would cost least on a single platform, the two unnamed models it tested gave different answers. One AI model told a Beijing Daily reporter that JD.com was cheapest at a reference price of 1,101 yuan; manual checkouts on three platforms came to 1,195 to 1,330 yuan. In a second test begun on November 6, a model recommended a shaver at about 190 yuan against a 349-yuan suggested retail price, then reported three days later that the first wave of stock had ended and prices had moved.
Pan Helin, a member of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s information and communications economy expert committee, told the paper that AI models "can only read the explicit rules in front of them" and stop working when prices change dynamically. A China Youth Daily survey cited by Beijing Daily found that 66.7% of respondents use AI to help them shop, mainly for price comparison and discount calculations.
Billing rules will decide whether tokens stay in the cart
Model makers are using the festival to reach consumers who mostly use AI for free. Xinhua cited a May survey by the Tencent Research Institute showing that 9.8% of AI users had paid for AI tools. Pan told Shangyou News that most token demand still comes from developers and enterprises, and that the token economy "can already monetize, but its monetization cannot yet cover compute costs."
Comparing plans is also hard. Ma Shenglong of China Mobile Qinghai told Xinhua that token consumption for the same text can vary by 20% to 50% across models. Wang Jiandong of the State Information Center proposed unified token measurement and conversion standards, clearer billing disclosure and third-party verification.
Festival sales across major platforms rose nearly 2.4% to 1.02 trillion yuan in the three weeks to October 31, SCMP reported, citing Syntun. The festival peaks on November 11. A figure from Tmall or JD.com for token plans sold in units or yuan, rather than another month-on-month percentage, would show whether AI usage has become a real consumer category.