AI toys boom on Chinese e-commerce platforms as return rates top 50%
Tech Planet (republished by 36Kr) reports that AI toys have become a hot new category on Chinese e-commerce: Taobao's AI toy transaction value grew more than 1,600% in 2025, Pinduoduo has just added an AI toy category and begun recruiting merchants, and JD.com offers its own JoyInside platform to power such toys. Prices typically range from 399 yuan to 3,000 yuan, far above 99-yuan blind boxes, and the article cites MIIT figures putting China's AI toy market at 29 billion yuan in 2025 with a projected 34.2 billion yuan in 2026. The flip side is heavy homogenization and difficult, unstable connectivity, with return rates persistently above 50%; vendors lean on hardware-plus-subscription models and one says it uses Doubao domestically and ChatGPT overseas.
AI toys are a mass-market test of putting LLM chat into cheap hardware, and the high return rate shows the experience is still the bottleneck.