Key facts
- Alibaba replaced cross-store coupons such as spend 300 yuan to save 50 with straight 15% discounts.
- JD.com dropped presale deposits in 2023 and now sells in-stock goods outright.
- Alibaba's Tmall AI Token Center offers packages from Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z.AI.
- Alibaba said AI laptop sales rose more than 300% year on year in the first hour of the Nov. 11 checkout.
- Sales across platforms reached 1.695 trillion yuan in the October 7 to November 11, 2025 period, Syntun said.
Alibaba's Singles' Day, now in its 18th edition, has been reshaped from a single midnight sales rush into weeks of promotions with simpler terms, as platforms court more cautious shoppers. The main sales date is Nov. 11.
Alibaba began moving its presales start to 8pm in 2021 and shifted its main sales windows to that hour in 2022, according to CNA. It also replaced complex cross-store coupons, such as spending 300 yuan to save 50 yuan, with straight 15% discounts. JD.com scrapped its presale model in 2023 and now sells goods in stock outright.
"Now it all has moved to 8 o'clock in the evening so that everybody is all relaxed (and) sitting on the sofa," Jason Yu, managing director at Beijing-based CTR Market Research, told CNA.
For the first time, AI token packages were offered as a significant consumer category during the festival, NBC News reported. Top livestreamer Austin Li sold 100,000 monthly memberships of Alibaba's QwenWork office AI service within half an hour during a Taobao Live broadcast on Monday, the company said, equivalent to about 2 trillion AI tokens.
Alibaba's Tmall launched an AI Token Center offering packages from Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z.AI, the company said. JD.com introduced an AI token section with services from DeepSeek, Z.AI and ByteDance's Volcano Engine. Alibaba said AI token plan sales rose 450% from October 1 to October 20 from the previous month, and AI laptop sales rose more than 300% year on year in the first hour of the Nov. 11 checkout period.
Sales across platforms reached 1.695 trillion yuan in the October 7 to November 11, 2025 promotional period, up 14.2% year on year, according to data provider Syntun. That growth was roughly half the 26.6% recorded in 2024.