China's Singles Day shopping festival puts AI selling power to the test

By Sophie Yu and Casey Hall

BEIJING, Nov 11 (Reuters) - If you are looking for evidence of how enthusiastically China is adopting AI, look no further than the country's premier month-long Singles Day shopping festival.

Shopping via chatbots that recommend, direct and complete purchases is on the rise, AI-enabled devices such as toys and robots are being heavily promoted and consumers are snapping up bundles of AI tokens — units of computing that people buy to use AI models.

For e-commerce firms such as Alibaba 9988.HK, JD.com 9618.HK and PDD Holdings PDD.O, artificial intelligence has offered a new way to keep cautious consumers engaged amid fierce competition.

For example, Alibaba platforms — Tmall for established brands and Taobao for a wider range of merchants — offer AI-driven research, virtual try-ons of clothing and tools to help users find discounts.

On short video and social commerce platform Douyin, AI drove roughly 5% of purchases through chatbot links in October, according to data from WPIC Marketing + Technologies. For considered purchases such as supplements, that share exceeded 20%.

"This is still a very new gateway and discovery channel," Jacob Cooke, chief executive of the research firm, said. "I expect it to account for a growing share of direct purchases, comparable to livestreaming or social commerce."

Whether AI has excited consumers sufficiently to boost overall spending, however, remains to be seen.

"Some brands benefit more based on how the platforms are tuned or how the brands are pricing their products," said Ben Cavender, managing director at Shanghai-based China Market Research Group.

But brands can also be hurt "if they are no longer showing up in product searches because the consumer is defaulting to letting an AI assistant do the 'shopping'," he added.

Sales for Singles Day climbed 2.4% between October 7 and October 31, according to third-party data platform Syntun, which will provide an updated figure for the entire event on Thursday.

Singles Day started out as a one-day event but has morphed into month-long festival with discounts galore, albeit with different start dates for different platforms.

The 2.4% figure compares with a 1.1% rise in China's retail sales for the year through to end-September.

AN AI-EMBEDDED SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

AI has become much more embedded in the Chinese shopping experience than in Western markets due to the dominance of super apps. Their AI agents can conduct research, complete transactions, apply coupons and schedule deliveries without the shopper ever having to use a separate app.

Researching specific requirements is also now much easier.

A shopper can ask a chatbot to find a washing machine suitable for a narrow balcony and quiet nighttime use within a specific budget, said Liu Xingliang, a Beijing-based independent technology analyst.

JD.com said its AI shopping assistant, Dongdong, drew nearly 80 million users seeking advice for this year's Singles Day festival, more than triple last year's users.

AI devices are also growing in popularity. AI toys surpassed 100 million yuan ($15 million) in sales on Alibaba's platforms within one year of launching as a new category, the e-commerce giant said.

One such product is Dr. Look's AI learning camera, which allows children to take a picture of, say, a leaf or an insect, which the camera identifies and then explains its characteristics.

Sales of AI companion robots rose nearly fivefold year-on-year in the second half of October, Alibaba also said, without disclosing how many were sold.

Tmall said sales of AI tokens rose more than 700% between October 15 and November 5, compared with the period from September 15 to October 5. Top livestreamer Austin Li featured AI products for the first time, selling 100,000 monthly subscriptions to Alibaba's QwenWork within 30 minutes.

For some shoppers, AI tools have already become a natural part of buying online.

Amanda Gao, a 40-year-old office worker in Beijing, said she uses Taobao's AI virtual try-on feature whenever she shops for clothes. "I find the function useful and fun," she said.

($1 = 6.6703 Chinese yuan)