Many Chinese companies didn't have much to celebrate this Singles' Day, an unofficial anti-Valentine's Day holiday that offers a gauge of consumers' willingness to spend. One bright spot: artificial-intelligence tokens.
Shoppers typically take advantage of holiday discounts to spend on clothes and household items, but this year they splurged on AI tokens--the currency used to pay for computing power to run AI models.
The developers behind China's most popular chatbots, including Z.AI, MiniMax and Alibaba's Qwen, all opened stores on Alibaba's Tmall platform ahead of the day that has become one of the world's biggest online-shopping events.
Earlier this month, Alibaba sent an executive to promote AI subscriptions on one of the most popular live-streaming channels on its e-commerce platforms, selling 100,000 monthly packages within half an hour.
Z.AI's Tmall store is offering a seven-day coding plan trial at $3. MiniMax offered 50% off on some of its token plans on the first three days of its store opening in October.
Other major e-commerce platforms have capitalized on the trend.
Alibaba rival JD.com rolled out a "token section" on its e-commerce platform where consumers can buy token plans of major Chinese AI players like DeepSeek. Sales of AI-related products, such as smart glasses and cameras, doubled from a year earlier, JD.com said.
Outside AI, Chinese consumers also splashed out on on-demand delivery, pushing sales up 33% after a brutal price war in the sector led to major discounts.
Analysts have looked at Singles' Day as a measure of consumer confidence ever since the one-day shopping spree, established in 2009, evolved into a monthlong campaign from mid-October to mid-November.
The promotions are a headliner on the Chinese shopping calendar, pulling in billions in sales, but momentum has been waning in recent years as economic headwinds keep consumers cautious.
E-commerce companies have also become more low-key in recent years, refraining from releasing total sales numbers.
So far this year, consumer sentiment has been subdued, with total retail sales of consumer goods growing just 1.1% during the first nine months.
But there was some slight momentum in initial Singles' Day tallies.
According to data provider Syntun, sales for Chinese e-commerce platforms operated by tech giants such as Alibaba and JD.com reached about 1.77 trillion yuan during the campaign, or about $265.33 billion, up 4.8% from last year.
Last year, the year-on-year sales growth was 14%, according to Syntun.
Final results will come after taking into account product returns over the next few days, Jefferies analysts said, citing an industry expert.
The expert Jefferies cite, without naming him, expects product returns to still go up this year, but not meaningfully. Looking ahead, China's e-commerce sales are likely to benefit from low-quality merchants exiting the industry in 2027, he said.
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