China’s Singles’ Day (or Double 11) shopping festival kicked off its 2026 presales on October 15, with promotions running until around November 11. For those unacquainted, it’s the largest shopping festival in the world, generating almost US$250 billion in sales last year.
Alibaba and JD both held kickoff press conferences on October 15, with Alibaba’s presale starting at 8pm. Here are some of the interesting storylines I’m monitoring around this year’s festival.
The biggest change is around Taobao and Tmall’s discount mechanisms. In previous years, Alibaba offered layered cross-store discounts on top of merchant discounts. For example, “spend RMB 300, save RMB 50”. That RMB 300 threshold could be reached through purchases across multiple stores. This year, that mechanism has been scrapped in favour of simplified discounts of 1%, 5% or 15%, depending on the product category. Alibaba is calling these “official instant discounts”. With government subsidies still in place (and visible directly on the platforms), consumers can see a clear, lower price for each product they’re viewing, which should help drive purchases.
This change is also a win for merchants. In previous editions of the festival, customers would often overbuy to reach a discount threshold, then return the products they didn’t want. Consumers should benefit too, as they generally prefer simpler discounting.
Second, I’m excited to see the growing role of AI in this year’s festival. AI shopping assistants are expected to play an important role, with Qwen (Alibaba), Dongdong (JD) and Doubao (Douyin) now integrated into the shopping experience on their respective platforms. Our client teams are already helping brands position themselves to appear in these AI-generated results. We’re also seeing significantly more AI-generated livestreams than last year, something WPIC has been deploying for clients for about two years now.
Another fascinating development is that Zhipu, MiniMax and Qwen are now selling AI tokens on Taobao and Tmall, complete with Double 11 deals. Consumers and businesses can actually stock up on AI tokens during this year’s shopping festival. That’s a first.
While Alibaba remains the biggest player during Singles’ Day, there are some interesting developments on other platforms. Douyin kicked off its sales on October 15, while JD started some promotions on October 12 and RedNote on October 10. Douyin and RedNote are offering more platform vouchers and promotional traffic support than in previous years. RedNote is also using Singles’ Day to encourage users to sign up for its new e-commerce membership programme, roughly translated as Little Red Card.
Alibaba’s 88VIP programme has been massively successful at creating value for premium shoppers while helping the platform generate more revenue from those users. It’ll be interesting to see whether RedNote can replicate that success.
