Key facts
- Singles Day sales rose 2.4% between October 7 and October 31, per third-party data platform Syntun.
- China's retail sales rose 1.1% in the year through end-September, Syntun's comparison figure.
- On Douyin, AI drove roughly 5% of October purchases through chatbot links, per WPIC Marketing + Technologies.
- JD.com said its Dongdong AI assistant drew nearly 80 million users, more than triple last year.
- Alibaba said AI toys passed 100 million yuan ($15 million) in sales within a year of launch.
- Tmall said AI token sales rose more than 700% between October 15 and November 5.
Singles Day sales in China rose 2.4% between October 7 and October 31, according to third-party data platform Syntun, as e-commerce groups Alibaba, JD.com and PDD Holdings pushed artificial intelligence tools into the month-long shopping festival. Syntun plans to publish an updated figure for the full event on Thursday.
The 2.4% gain compares with a 1.1% rise in China's retail sales for the year through end-September. Alibaba's Tmall and Taobao platforms offer AI-driven research, virtual try-ons of clothing and tools to help users find discounts.
On short video and social commerce platform Douyin, AI drove roughly 5% of purchases through chatbot links in October, according to data from WPIC Marketing + Technologies. For considered purchases such as supplements, that share exceeded 20%. "This is still a very new gateway and discovery channel," Jacob Cooke, chief executive of the research firm, said. "I expect it to account for a growing share of direct purchases, comparable to livestreaming or social commerce."
JD.com said its AI shopping assistant, Dongdong, drew nearly 80 million users seeking advice for the 2026 festival, more than triple last year's users. Alibaba said AI toys surpassed 100 million yuan ($15 million) in sales on its platforms within one year of launching as a category, and that sales of AI companion robots rose nearly fivefold year-on-year in the second half of October, without disclosing how many were sold.
Tmall said sales of AI tokens, units of computing that people buy to use AI models, rose more than 700% between October 15 and November 5, compared with September 15 to October 5. Top livestreamer Austin Li featured AI products for the first time, selling 100,000 monthly subscriptions to Alibaba's QwenWork within 30 minutes.
Ben Cavender, managing director at Shanghai-based China Market Research Group, said some brands benefit more based on how platforms are tuned or how brands price their products, but brands can also be hurt "if they are no longer showing up in product searches because the consumer is defaulting to letting an AI assistant do the 'shopping'."