Double 11 shifts to AI shopping guides as platforms tie subsidies to ad spend
An analysis published by TMTPost argues the 18th Double 11 festival has been stretched into a shopping season of more than a month, with platforms cutting back coupon-stacking rules while linking subsidies to how much merchants spend on advertising. Alimama's Double 11 coupons are allocated by AI according to a merchant's ad spending, with qualifying brands receiving up to 55% back in performance-ad credits, while JD.com's "Steady Profit" scheme compensates for gaps against system-recommended ROI targets and returns up to 12% for higher ad spend. The piece also says Douyin added a Doubao section to its merchant dashboard, and that Taobao's Qwen shopping assistant and JD's smart shopping guide are competing for a new discovery entry point, citing JD figures that order costs fell 15%-27% for assets optimized to its product-data standard versus generic AI assets.
In e-commerce, AI is moving from a content-generation tool to the layer that allocates traffic and subsidies and decides which products get seen, though it does not necessarily lower merchants' customer-acquisition costs.