AI lands on the Double 11 shelves as large models start selling by the item

From Token packages and PCs with pre-installed large models to robots and AI toys, e-commerce platforms are now handling AI consumption in a wide variety of forms.

At 8 p.m. on October 20, Tmall's Double 11 officially began sales across all categories, with 1 million global brands and 72 million products participating, both figures hitting record highs. JD.com had already jumped the gun by launching in-stock sales across all categories at 8 p.m. on October 12, with orders in service categories growing more than 130% year-on-year in the first week of the promotion. Douyin Mall's Double 11 Good Goods Festival also kicked off on the 15th. As the promotion enters its main phase, this year's shelves include a new category of goods that is invisible and requires no shipping.

Starting in September, large-model vendors such as Zhipu and Qianwen Office successively opened official flagship stores on Tmall, and Tmall simultaneously launched a Token top-up zone called "AI Space Station"; JD.com upgraded its AI shopping assistant "Dongdong," and the JoyAI App launched a video shopping digital human. New AI achievements are fully participating in this year's promotion.

For the past decade and more, Double 11 has been about physical goods, with competition centered on the number of brands, the scale of SKUs (stock keeping units), and the depth of discounts. This year adds another layer: AI appears in two roles at once—as a tool in merchants' hands that saves labor, and as a product bought by the piece in consumers' shopping carts. The promotion's high-concurrency traffic has thus naturally become a public stress test for these tools and services.

The core competition on the tools track comes down to whether they can steadily handle the instant surge in traffic during the promotion. A JD.com Double 11 representative told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that logistics is the most easily perceived stress test, and the data clearly reflects it: JD Logistics' "Super Brain" large model 3.0 has pushed the accuracy of parcel volume forecasts for delivery routes above 94.2%, and the adoption rate of AI-recommended optimal delivery routes has exceeded 90.2%. The "Zhilang" goods-to-person robots, the "Yilang" embodied intelligent dexterous arms (with 99.9% accuracy in full-chain parcel tracking), the "Dulang" unmanned vehicles, and village-delivery drones together handle transport capacity during Double 11.

Digital human technology is reshaping live-stream shopping guide services. JD's digital human JoyAvatar provides round-the-clock live streaming, and more than 90,000 merchants are using AI digital humans to continuously reach users, generate sales strategies, and support one-click implementation. JD's internal test data shows that the AI advertising model improves incremental return on investment by more than 20% compared with traditional advertising models.

Xu Ran, vice chairman of JD Group's SEC and CEO of JD Group, said: "During the promotion we will increase investment, using more efficient and practical AI tools to help merchants operate, and driving the number of new merchants with sales exceeding one million yuan to grow more than 60% year-on-year."

Alibaba's move came the day before its Double 11 press conference. On October 14, Qianwen Office released an e-commerce edition offering capabilities such as aggregated analysis of operational data, content material generation, and advertising assistance. Chen Yusen, vice president of Alibaba Group and CEO of Qianwen Office, proposed a major shift in human-machine division of labor at the Tmall Double 11 press conference: in the past, matters first reached people, who then judged whether to hand them to AI; in the future, AI will process information and sort out problems first, delivering to people only the steps that require human decision-making. The boundary of AI's responsibilities thus expands to cover task discovery, process advancement, and information distribution.

Multiple e-commerce practitioners said AI "starting next year will fully enter merchants' own internal corporate workflows," and roles in different departments will all use it for iteration and capability output. This means platform AI capabilities are migrating from "helping merchants do business within the platform" to "working inside merchants' companies."

Computing power goes on the shelf, and the promotion gains a category of invisible goods

Just as AI tools undergo public stress testing under the promotion's peak traffic, computing power itself has also been put on e-commerce shelves, becoming a new category of invisible products this Double 11.

JD.com chose to embed large-model interaction capabilities into hardware, relying on JoyInside to deploy robots, toys, and smart home devices, covering three major scenarios—home life, parent-child companionship, and health care—with more than 300 related products launched. The platform also launched a smart terminal ranking based on five dimensions—comprehensive sales, positive reviews, growth rate, browsing, and brand strength—lowering the decision threshold for choosing smart products.

A Token is the unit of measurement for large-model calls and consumption, previously aimed mainly at developers and enterprise customers and billed by API call volume. When such computing-power products appear on e-commerce platforms dominated by C-end consumers, they must first answer a core question: who are they sold to?

Liu Bo (whose courtesy name is Jialuo), vice president of Alibaba Group and president of the Tmall business unit, gave the answer: the target group is not the general mass of ordinary consumers, but individual users and small teams with clear AI usage needs—learning-oriented, family-oriented, and research-oriented users, as well as one-person companies or small teams of three or fewer people. Such groups were already using large models continuously, but previously had to pay separately by volume across various vendors' platforms. Tmall is pushing vendors to launch Token "combo packages" for Double 11, bundled according to different scenarios such as study, family, and solo studio. In Liu Bo's analogy, "it's like girls buying beauty sets on Double 11."

Price is precisely the entry point of this business logic. Once frontier computing power is packaged into monthly, quarterly, and annual cards, it has for the first time acquired a price tag that can be compared horizontally with ordinary consumer goods; the purchase process has also been simplified from business contracts and corporate invoicing to online ordering and pay-as-you-go top-ups.

Tmall 3C Digital General Manager Cheng Yuan takes the judgment a step further: as AI continues to iterate, buying Tokens in the future will be as simple as paying utility bills. He mentioned a shift taking place in the industry: traditional hardware brands are under sustained margin pressure, while the Token plan binds hardware with computing power services, so consumers "buy both hardware and service," which is expected to upend the old model of hardware sales profiting from purchase-sale price spreads. In Cheng Yuan's view, for most ordinary consumers, agonizing over 32G or 64G of VRAM is of little significance; the key is whether the device can smoothly run office large models; the platform's value lies in translating obscure technical jargon into perceivable scenario-based solutions, driving consumer decisions from "technical parameter-oriented" to "scenario value-oriented."

From Token packages and PCs with pre-installed large models to robots and AI toys, e-commerce platforms are taking on AI consumption in diverse forms. On the same App shelf, physical goods and intelligent services are beginning to be sold side by side.

The divergence of the two lines is unfolding simultaneously on the industry side and the consumer side.

Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, believes that this year's Double 11 has three common directions across major platforms: continuously ramping up AI applications to help merchants cut operating costs and improve operational efficiency; increasing supply certainty and reducing return rates to amplify platform and merchant subsidies; and leveraging their respective differentiated advantages to jointly build momentum. In his view, GMV (gross merchandise volume) is no longer the platform's primary goal; the real core highlight of this Double 11 is the usage rate and paid conversion of AI tools.

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On the consumer side, each company is likewise embedding AI into everyday shopping. JD.com upgraded its AI shopping assistant "Dongdong," launched a video shopping digital human on the JoyAI App that supports scanning codes to identify products, voice search for the same item, and placing orders via call, and connected life services such as food delivery, hotels, and health consultations. Taobao Tmall integrated Tongyi Qianwen into its product library, so the AI shopping assistant can filter products, compare prices, and organize reviews and discounts based on user needs; Douyin extended AI consumption coupon distribution to products such as Doubao, connecting its content ecosystem with shelf shopping.

The two lines point to the same judgment: e-commerce platforms are no longer just sales channels, but are simultaneously operating two types of supply—physical goods and intelligent services. When users buy both goods and computing power in the same App, the consumer decision-making chain is restructured, and the entry point for brand exposure expands from traditional search rankings to conversational recommendations.

Zhuang Shuai told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that the value of "Double 11" remains prominent: it is both a peak testing ground for new technologies, driving consumption and stimulating domestic demand, and it continues to incubate new sales models. Platforms each leverage their differentiated advantages, build momentum together, and use the major promotion scenario to verify AI commercialization capability and the industrial ecosystem.

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