Double 11: Tmall Puts Tokens on the Shelf—How Far Is AI from Becoming a Utility?

On the evening of November 2, in the product lineup for Double 11 in Li Jiaqi's livestream, a new term appeared: Token.

Among the 200 trillion Token benefits listed that day, 100,000 monthly cards for the Qianwen Office Basic Edition membership were sold, limited to one order per Taobao ID and only for activation by new users. In the livestream, the beauty makeup shade-testing shots familiar to fans were replaced with office scenario demonstrations. Li Jiaqi and Qianwen Office CEO Chen Yusen demonstrated on screen one-click document generation, organizing children's wrong answers, and turning livestream replays into business analysis reports.

Eight years ago, in the same livestream room, he sold 15,000 lipsticks in 5 minutes.

In the past, similar limited-order benefits were more about attracting traffic, with no expectation of making money. But this time it is different. Behind the ultra-discount monthly cards is Tmall's first inclusion of Token as an independent category in Double 11. On the first day of sales, transactions in this category grew 450% month on month; Zhipu, Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax and others have already queued up to open flagship stores on the e-commerce platform. This business looks very much like the data packages that telecom operators have sold for thirty years, turning computing power into prepaid goods like phone credit.

The problem is that computing power is not data traffic. This sentence determines that Double 11's Token is not just about creating a "big news story," but also the real beginning of the normalization of AI consumption. What is worth paying attention to, then, is why vendors are willing to offer discounts, why the platform is willing to provide the shelves, and what real value the 100,000 monthly cards users buy have for the expansion of AI in lower-tier markets in China. All of these need to be examined one by one.

01. Telecom operators did this business thirty years ago

Token is the unit of measurement for information processed by large models, and also the billing unit for AI services. The model reads requests, performs inference, and generates answers, consuming Tokens at every step. This is no different in business logic from a phone consuming MB of data traffic for every video watched. What large model vendors have put on Tmall is exactly the shelf solution proven by telecom operators: quantifying and packaging invisible resources into prepaid goods that are purchased monthly and deducted as used.

On September 2, Zhipu's first official flagship store landed on Tmall. On September 3, Tmall launched the Token recharge center, connecting Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax, and DeepSeek. On October 13, MiniMax opened its brand official flagship store.

As of now, Alibaba Cloud Bailian, Qianwen Office, Qoder, Moonshot AI, StepFun and others have also fully settled into Tmall's AI Token store, with computing power and model services becoming products that can be ordered directly. By the time of Double 11, monthly cards, quarterly cards, annual cards, card codes and direct recharge were all available.

Zhipu Coding Plan is priced from 118 yuan to 1,078 yuan and supports more than 20 mainstream Agents including ZCode, ClaudeCode, and Codex; MiniMax's M Plan is divided into three tiers, Go, Explore, and Build, with 50% off the first month and monthly plans starting at 24.5 yuan; packages generally retain dual rate limits with a 5-hour rolling window and weekly quota, exactly like the throttling after exceeding data limits in data packages.

Tmall 3C Digital General Manager Si Dengyu put this step plainly: in the past, there was always a membrane between consumers and official websites. "Today we use a standardized store e-commerce transaction system on the platform, allowing consumers to complete consumption just like recharging phone credit or buying memberships. This is the first step we must take."

But this analogy only holds on the shelf, not in the cost structure.

This is because the marginal cost of data traffic approaches zero. The larger the user scale, the more sufficient the statistical multiplexing, and overselling costs almost nothing. Token is not like that; every unit has a cost. Costs can be compressed, but cannot approach zero. Every Token corresponds to GPUs, electricity, and depreciation, and cannot be reused at low cost. Any overselling means queuing and rate limiting. Previously, Ding Ding, deputy general manager of China Unicom Data Intelligence, judged that Token cannot simply apply the logic of buying data traffic. Precisely because costs are rigid, that seemingly troublesome rate-limiting mechanism is essentially a product of cost constraints, not a preference in product design.

The logic of discounts is also determined by this. Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows that in June 2026, domestic average daily Token consumption was about 500 trillion, nearly 4 times that of December 2025. During the same period, the normalized average price rose from 6.8 yuan to 13.46 yuan, nearly doubling.

In a market where both volume and price are rising, vendors are willing to give discounts to lock in certain prepaid cash flow, trading gross margin for certainty.

Electricity is sold by the kilowatt-hour, data traffic by the GB, and now computing power is sold by Token. Once the unit of measurement can be purchased in packages, technology shifts from professional supply to mass consumption. But before the market matures and before weights and measures are unified, expansion into lower-tier markets involves friction. The same passage of text may consume 20% to 50% more or fewer Tokens across different models, and each company's billing rules vary widely. Prices are similarly disparate: per million Tokens, DeepSeek-flash costs as little as 1 yuan for input and 4.5 yuan for output during idle periods, Zhipu GLM-5.3 costs 8 yuan for input and 28 yuan for output, and Moonshot AI kimi-k3.1-pro-highspeed costs 26 yuan for input and 136 yuan for output, with the most expensive and cheapest differing by dozens of times.

The dual lack of uniformity in measurement and pricing is a hard problem this business cannot avoid. Entering e-commerce is perhaps the optimal answer.

02. Official websites sell capability; e-commerce sells trust

Before Token was listed on Tmall, this business had always existed, but there were thresholds.

Users need to register on the official website's open platform, complete real-name verification, create an API Key, and put the key into their code—only then do they have the basic conditions for use. This logic splits "buying Tokens" and "using Tokens" into two separate things, and every step filters out non-technical users.

Here, e-commerce compresses this into three steps: choose a plan, pay, and bind with one click, shortening the process and making it more convenient; the API Key is replaced by monthly and annual cards. A low threshold is only the entry ticket; the deeper value lies in two other layers.

One layer is the shift in pricing power.

In the past, Token prices were buried in each vendor's API documentation, which only developers would read, and developers generally had low price sensitivity; now Zhipu, MiniMax, and Qwen plans are displayed on Tmall pages, and the pressure to compare prices has shifted from the demand side back to the supply side.

As of the first half of 2026, China's generative AI users had surpassed 700 million, with a penetration rate of over 50%, but the habit of paying for AI tools on the consumer side is far from established. For this group, being able to compare prices is itself a way to cultivate consumer habits. Tmall has about 64 million 88VIP members, whose average annual spending is 9 times that of non-members, buying an average of 19 categories and services—they are the first batch of retail customers this business has in mind.

The other layer is what the channel structure reveals.

Also listing on e-commerce, Zhipu, MiniMax, and Alibaba Cloud chose self-operated flagship stores, meaning they chose to independently handle product listing, customer service, pricing strategy, and marketing activities, and also to pass the platform's qualification review. It is understood that Zhipu has recently even begun recruiting a "brand narrative manager"; Kimi and DeepSeek chose only authorized agency distribution, leaving pricing, delivery, and after-sales outside their own systems. This shows that the first three are attempting long-term brand management, while the latter two are testing the waters through channels. The divide between the two models corresponds to a divergence in vendors' organizational capabilities.

In addition, the e-commerce platform's qualification review, order retention, after-sales consultation, and user reviews provide an endorsement of delivery certainty for the "invisible and intangible" virtual consumption of buying Tokens. For a purchase where you pay first, receive later, and the quota runs on the vendor's servers, what consumers are willing to trust is the payment habits and platform after-sales they have used for twenty years, not a promise on an official website page.

The farther a virtual good is from being "visible," the higher the premium on platform credit.

For consumers, the value is very concrete. Buying Tokens on Tmall means after-sales is backed by the platform, there are exclusive e-commerce channel plans to choose from, and during Double 11 you can also catch big-promotion bargains: the Qwen AI Lite monthly card is 60 yuan on the official website and 39 yuan at the promotional price; Qoder Professional is 88.99 yuan on the official website and 58.98 yuan at the promotional price. Nor do you have to change consumption habits you have followed for twenty years, or first take a technical course before deciding whether to pay for AI.

One detail: in Taobao's top-up center, "top up Tokens" has already been listed next to topping up phone credit, mobile data, and utilities. Placing Tokens in the queue of everyday consumer goods is Tmall's strategic grading of this business.

03. The value of 450% growth needs to be calculated separately

Data shows that on the first day of Double 11 sales, transactions in Tmall's Token category grew 450% from the previous period; within 48 hours of Zhipu opening on Tmall, brand searches surged 50-fold from the previous period, driving transactions of AI subscription products on the platform up more than 160%.

In Li Jiaqi's livestream on November 2, 100,000 units of the Qwen Office Basic monthly card were sold in half an hour. But high growth includes a low-base component. Note that the category only opened in September; the high month-on-month growth is the natural curve of a new category, more symbolic than actual transaction volume. Li Jiaqi's numbers deserve closer calculation: each Taobao ID is limited to one order, and only new users can activate it. The so-called "20 trillion Tokens" corresponds not to revenue but to 100,000 potential paying users; recovery depends on the rate at which monthly cards renew at the original price from the second month onward.

What Li Jiaqi sold was more than 20 trillion Tokens; the retention of AI office use is the real denominator in this customer-acquisition calculation.

The signals in financial statements and industry-chain structure are more solid.

In the first half of 2026, Zhipu's Token-call-related revenue was 825 million yuan, up 2,735.7% year on year, accounting for 86.5% of total revenue; at a time when most model companies still rely on financing to stay alive, Token revenue can support a company's financial statements. Moves across the industry chain point in the same direction: in March this year, Alibaba established a Token Hub business group directly overseen by the group CEO; in the same month, Tencent Cloud upgraded its MaaS platform to Token Hub; in May, the three major telecom operators collectively launched Token plans. From cloud vendors to telecom operators to independent model makers, the entire industry chain is treating the same thing as a standardized commodity. Double 11 is simply the occasion when this business has a scene the general public can see.

The significance also extends to hardware.

This Double 11, AI PCs, AI glasses, and AI earphones made concentrated appearances, but hardware detached from model capabilities is just a concept. Si Dengyu said, "Some brands are already pushing AI PCs and AI phones. If these are detached from Tokens or from large language models themselves, they are just a concept... We graft this onto hardware products, and in the future consumers can do hybrid deployment; there is a lot of room for imagination."

Consumers buying both hardware and Token Plans means that, beyond the purchase-sale price margin, hardware brands grow a second curve of subscription revenue.

As for what buying Tokens on Tmall means for consumers, it should be calmly placed in terms of stratification. Geeks and heavy users will not be locked in by plans: Wang Zimin, who makes AI videos in Beijing, spends 30,000 to 40,000 yuan a month on Tokens, and chooses official channels or e-commerce channels depending on who offers more "discounts."

What e-commerce plans truly serve is the mid- and low-frequency consumer side: family users, learning- and research-oriented users, and one-person companies. According to Si Dengyu's judgment, the covered population will start with geeks, then move to office white-collar workers, then to ordinary consumers enthusiastic about technology, and finally to the general public. The current user structure happens to stand at the second link of this expansion chain.

In other words, e-commerce does not replace official websites; it adds a retail layer to the Token market, reaching the people who would never have opened a vendor's official website.

Future plans will become more granular. According to the vision of platforms and vendors, Token plans will be like beauty brands matching sets by consumer group, combining products around needs such as learning, family, and one-person companies, turning AI usage needs into goods that are easier to choose. For now, though, the difficulties are real. Measurement standards are not unified, and plans are hard to convert between.

Wang Jiandong, deputy director of the Big Data Development Department of the State Information Center, has suggested unifying the Token measurement standard as soon as possible and introducing third-party verification; fixed-quota monthly cards face the mismatch of "buy more than you can use, buy less than you need"; and the discount intensity of most products cannot support "Double 11-level" expectations.

Market sentiment hopes that buying Tokens can become everyday consumption, but Tokens are not yet utilities. Putting them on the shelf is only the first step.

Thirty years ago, data packages did not invent the mobile internet, but they gave ordinary people a justified reason to use it.

This Double 11, Tokens as an independent category were placed in a major promotion and entered top livestream rooms, moving from developer backends into the public consumer market, and Tmall is also becoming a consumer entry point for concentrated AI product launches, transactions, and experiences.

But discounts will be withdrawn, and enthusiasm will fade. How far this business can go depends half on whether vendors can retain acquired users past the second month, and half on whether the platform can make after-sales and fulfillment solid.

It took thirty years, not thirty days, to build data packages into what they are; Tokens on Tmall may also have to travel this path.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Shi Tianhao Observation" (ID: shitianhao01), author: Diligent Haozi, published by 36Kr with authorization.