JD.com, the platform that started the 618 Shopping Festival 18 years ago, saw the number of users who made purchases grow by over 100%. The combined number of orders on JD.com online and offline, as well as takeaway, surpassed 2.2 billion. The JD.com app saw record-breaking users. Livestream orders grew 210% from last year, while JD Video also saw its orders increase by 251%. Meanwhile, Tmall from Alibaba reported that 453 brands reached over 100 million RMB (13.93 million USD) in transactions, up 24% YoY.

Subsidies and fatigue

The state-backed consumer subsidies for electrical appliances, consumer electronics and homeware were one of the main contributors to the 618 Shopping Festival this year. On the one hand, it is part of the reason JD.com, a platform with roots in appliances and electronics, thrived with quarterly revenue up 13.4% and 16% YoY in Q1 and Q2. But on the other hand, the subsidies introduced at the beginning of this year have led many consumers in the market for new subsidised goods to make their purchases already.

Partly due to the subsidies and partly due to a strategic shift, we have been seeing consistently low prices all year round in various categories and on different platforms. There have also been anecdotal reports that some items enjoyed less discount than the International Women’s Day (IWD) sales in March. The long sales period also desensitised people, making the event less exciting.

Top streamers: exit?

This year, we are seeing two interpretations regarding top streamers. Commentators in China have been calling for an end to top streamers. But this year, the opinion is divided on whether they’ve started phasing out or simply changed the way they operate.

First of all, many big names participated in the 618 livestream sales, such as Xinba (辛巴), Austin Li Jiaqi (李佳琦) and Dong Yuhui (董宇辉) of Walking with Hui (与辉同行). Many of them significantly reduced their presence on their channel, especially Xinba and Dong Yuhui. Xinba only appeared on 2 streams in May, and Dong appeared on 9 livestreams over the course of the festival, while Li Jiaqi appeared on 6 in June. However, Xinba sold a whopping 4 billion RMB (556.44 million USD) on his first stream, while Li Jiaqi earned between 2.5 and 3.5 billion RMB (347.78 and 486.89 million USD) and Dong, 176 million RMB (24.48 million USD).

Top Streamers: pursued by AI?

Meanwhile, the top streamers are growing their team to make up for their reduced presence. Xinba’s apprentice Dandan (蛋蛋) earned an impressive 1 billion RMB (139.11 million USD) on her first stream this 618, proving that it is doable. However, Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) of Be Friends (交个朋友) took a different path.

On 15 June, Luo appeared on Baidu’s livestream sales channel. But despite his natural interaction with his co-host, he only knew minute details about the products and his facial expressions were slightly off. It turns out that Luo did not personally appear on the stream, but rather his digital human doppelgänger. The co-host was also a digital human. A 97,000-word script and the 8,300 movements were all created by AI, uncanny to Luo’s style and mannerisms. He later posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, that he was stunned by the result. The stream attracted 1.3 million views, and the GMV reached 55 million RMB (765,110.94 USD). The stunt proved another way to replace top streamers in 2025.

But a less dramatic use of AI was also impressive this year. AIGC tools, such as Taobao’s image-to-video generation tool, helped many apparel merchants create modelling videos from photoshoots. Alimama, the marketing wing of Alibaba, also provided store management tools for merchants to find the right audience, including the creation of marketing assets.

Other trends this year included more microdramas being deployed for sales, and food delivery platform Meituan joined the festival with its “instant retail” arm. Also, multi-channel network (MCN) agencies are doubling down on launching their own brands, such as Li Jiaqi’s Mei One, expanding its Mei One Selection range, while East Buy is launching its own brand of sanitary pads.

Rednote did not participate in the 618 sales at all, but soft-launched its new social commerce feature, the “friendly market” in June to showcase what its e-commerce future will look like. As many pundits commented, the focus this year is on people, and how to reach the right audience. This is shown in how Rednote parted ways with the festival, as well as Alibaba providing AI tools for its merchants. Perhaps we’ll see a different 618 next year or a more diverse sales strategy that is not anchored to large-scale festivals.

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Xiaomi topped many categories across platforms. Its smartphones surpassed the ‘sales and units sold’ ranking on JD.com and became the top-selling domestic brand in the smartphone category. It also took both the number 1 and number 2 spots on the domestic smartphone ranking with two individual models, as well as topping sales rankings for different price ranges.

On Tmall, Xiaomi was also the most sold domestic brand on the platform, with the REDMI K80 being the number one best-selling domestic phone model. On social commerce platforms Douyin, the Chinese sister app of TikTok and Pinduoduo from PDD Holdings, Xiaomi, was also number one in both sales and units sold on both platforms. On the Xiaomi Mall website and app, sales grew 18% year-on-year (YoY), with smartphones growing 17% and smart lifestyle products up 16%. In Xiaomi Home offline stores, revenue was up 51% YoY, with phones growing 31% and smart lifestyle increasing by 63% YoY.

Xiaomi’s success is not limited to its 618 sales. In Q1 2025, Xiaomi sold 13.3 million smartphones, up 40% YoY, reclaiming the number 1 spot in market share again in 10 years, with a 19% share. Xiaomi is aiming to become the top electrical appliances brand in China by 2030. With its smart ecosystem and support from mobile devices, this looks increasingly achievable.

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Within the apparel category, around 345 brands earned over 10 million RMB (1.39 million USD) and nearly 3,090 brands sold over 1 million RMB (138,806 USD) during the presale. 1,088 brands increased sales by over 500% year-on-year (YoY). Much of the growth comes from the brands’ ability to foresee trends, such as how Beneunder leveraged the need for sun protection to push its bucket hats to become the best in the category. Meanwhile, the improved user experience helped membership sales grow. Not only did brand membership contribute to more than 60% of the brands’ sales, but Alibaba’s 88VIP members also contributed nearly 60% of overall transactions, a near 40% YoY growth.

Haier leads in the large electrical appliances category, followed by Midea, Xiaomi and Gree. Small appliances saw Xiaomi dominating. A combination of governmental subsidies and the sales festival saw another boom in high-end appliances. For example, 100-inch TV sets saw 150% growth. Cleaning robots witnessed a 10-fold growth in sales and a 19-fold growth in searches. Pet-related appliances also doubled. Digital cameras experienced a renaissance in popularity with sales up 80% compared to the last 618.

As the second wave of 618 progresses, Alimama’s AI promotion has helped merchants reach their target audience. The “super livestream” saw its transactions grow by over 50%. With the help of AI, this 618 might really see a return of shopping festivals.

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Meituan’s net profit was 10.1 billion RMB (1.39 billion USD), up 87.3% from last year, and the adjusted net profit was up 46.2% at 10.9 billion RMB (1.5 billion USD). Its core “local commerce”, including food delivery, hotel and travel, its “flash buy” instant delivery, etc., also grew 18% in Q1 to 64.3 billion RMB (8.93 billion USD).

The “flash buy” (闪购) service was Meituan’s entrance into the “instant delivery” business. By the end of March, it had already amassed over 500 million users nationwide, mostly young consumers of the post-90 and post-95 generations. Meituan announced earlier that the “flash buy” service would be available during the 618 Shopping Festival this year by giving away 618 RMB (85.78 USD) worth of vouchers to every user, with members eligible for more vouchers.

With the competition between platforms heating up since JD.com entered the food delivery market earlier this year, Meituan vs JD vs Alibaba has also moved into instant delivery and “local life” services. Meituan is expanding the presence of its Xiaoxiang supermarket, including offline. Meanwhile, Alibaba is strengthening its Ele.me food delivery and “flash buy” instant deliveries. This 618 sees a “battle of ecosystems” surrounding the broader “local life” sector. With groceries “delivered under 30 minutes” and online integration between “seeding” and transaction, it certainly looks like this is the trend.

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Like the “Red Cat” initiative before this, the Rednote–JD.com partnership will reportedly enable direct links in Rednote merchandise posts that take users to JD.com to complete transactions. According to the report, the partnership will be officially announced in a matter of days.

This is not surprising, as before “Red Cat”, Rednote was already running several programmes with multiple e-commerce platforms, including Taobao and Tmall, as well as JD.com. Red Cat itself is sometimes described as an upgraded version of the previous arrangement. It is, then, only natural that Rednote would choose to upgrade its partnership with JD.com. However, it does cast doubt on some comments about Alibaba needing Rednote more than Rednote needs Alibaba, since Rednote is now teaming up with a second e-commerce platform.

It also throws Rednote’s own e-commerce venture into question. In fact, some pundits were already concerned when Red Cat was announced. With the latest report, some feel that Rednote is “selling out” and compromising its content with ads featuring outbound links. The community and the platform’s “cultural” labels are what attract users and content, so ads to e-commerce platforms might diminish the brand equity. However, as a business, Rednote needs the effective monetisation of the content ecosystem. The risk of the current strategy, then, is that it could make the path to Rednote becoming an e-commerce platform in its own right even longer.

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Under the new scheme, a new “ad link” feature will be added to notes on Rednote this 618. The direct conversion from content marketing to sales on the e-commerce platforms will complete the chain of “seeding (种草) – purchase” that many social commerce platforms have been trying to achieve, including both parties in the “Red Cat” initiative. This enviable “closed circuit” might give not only the Alibaba platforms but also Rednote an edge this 618 Festival, and could become a standard strategy in the future of e-commerce in China.

May the circle be unbroken

Other than the seamless cross-platform shopping experience for users and customers, Rednote, for the first time this 618, has made all analytics available to merchants. The data includes views, comments, likes, collects, shares and follows. In turn, Tmall will also make more analytics available, such as traffic acquisition data, search data, upsells, watches, follows and transactions. The two platforms will then complete the data chain on the customer journey from “seeding” to sales.

In fact, the “Red Cat” initiative is an extension of the existing “Little Red Star” (小红星) partnership programme between Alibaba and Rednote that started two years ago. It also provides an analytics system that helps merchants gauge the effectiveness of their “seeding” on Rednote and how that has helped their sales on Taobao and Tmall. In the past year, seeding notes from Taobao and Tmall merchants grew 20% in terms of click-through rate, and engagement rate grew 109%. Participating merchants also grew 335%.

As Alibaba claims, “the collaboration connects Xiaohongshu’s (Rednote’s) influential user-generated content (UGC) ecosystem with Taobao and Tmall’s robust e-commerce infrastructure”. Pundits have noted that this partnership can help Rednote better monetise its content and community ecosystem in the e-commerce arena, while helping conventional e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Tmall to leverage the seeding properties of the lifestyle social platform.

Red Cat on a hot tin roof

As the competition in the e-commerce space heats up, Alibaba has been shaking things up in recent years, especially since the beginning of 2025. Not only did it upgrade its “hour delivery” (小时达) to “Flash buy” (闪购) to compete with JD.com and Meituan’s instant delivery services in the “local life” service sector, but it has also been upping its game in the content field.

Ahead of 618, Alibaba is bringing out the big guns. In late April, Alibaba announced its 2 billion RMB (274.44 USD) investment in Taobao Livestream to grow users, merchandise virality, streamers and merchant-led streams. The group’s digital marketing branch, Alimama, also launched AIGC-powered video content and search features, further consolidating the content capabilities of Taobao and Tmall merchants. It is clear that the e-commerce giant is trying to harness the power of content seeding for its merchants.

At the same time, Rednote has also been trying to convert its seeding prowess into e-commerce sales. Faced with fierce competition from both fellow social commerce platforms, such as Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese sister app), as well as conventional e-commerce sites like Taobao, Tmall and JD.com, Rednote has been exploring its own modus operandi of “lifestyle e-commerce”. By banning outbound links to e-commerce platforms and asking merchants to set up shop on Rednote, the platform attempted to build its own seeding and sales ecosystem. Since 2023, Rednote has been gradually opening up to outbound links and in 2024, it launched a series of initiatives with various e-commerce platforms for data sharing and better “seeding”. The aforementioned “Little Red Star” is part of these.

Everything that rises must converge

And as with most things in the heavily competitive e-commerce space in China, Alibaba and Rednote are not the only ones who have considered collaboration. In mid-April, the video and streaming platform BiliBili announced that it would continue and upgrade the “Jinghuo” (京火) initiative that it had been working on with JD.com since 2023. Not only will merchants get a subsidy in the form of ads and promotion of their “seeding” video on the platform, but JD.com will also be providing up to 120% of traffic and exposure. In fact, like Rednote, BiliBili also has an initiative with Taobao and Tmall Group called “Starfire” (星火), which is being supplemented with a “Star Companion” (星伴) initiative for Taobao merchants to promote on BiliBili for platform promotion.

Deeper integration has been one of the key strategies for platforms such as Taobao and Tmall from Alibaba, not just content-wise. Last year, we saw news about Taobao deploying WeChat Pay for its payment and JD.com integrating Alipay, as well as Taobao allowing JD Logistics to become a shipping method for its platform. It would seem the days of high barriers between platforms are gradually becoming a thing of the past.

Of course, there is also Douyin, which is still focused on building an ecosystem that harnesses the power of its own vast content and user base to support its own e-commerce platform.

Meanwhile, the effect of the alliance on Rednote’s own e-commerce programme remains unclear. How the partnership can benefit the global expansion of Alibaba and Rednote is another thing that requires further monitoring.

However, in the long run, deeper collaborations between content and e-commerce platforms only seem natural, for both the customer experience and merchants. A merchant-centric strategy has been prevalent since the last 618 Festival, such as abandoning “absolute low prices” in favour of a gross merchandise value (GMV)-first strategy. The latest development of this trend is the end of the “refund only” no-return refund policies for all major e-commerce platforms. By making “seeding” analytics available to merchants and allowing redirect ads on the platform, the “Red Cat” initiative can be largely beneficial for merchants and is more than just a smoother transition for prospective customers. It won’t be surprising to see other e-commerce platforms team up like Rednote and Alibaba have this 618.

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On the previous day, Alimama, Alibaba’s digital marketing branch, announced a 3 billion RMB (411.63 million USD) subsidy for merchants in the form of “red envelopes”. This would make Alibaba’s total subsidies for the 618 Festival this year 5 billion RMB (686.09 million USD). At the same event, Alimama also announced that its AI services will be available for merchants this 618. From image-to-video AIGC to AI-powered search features, Alimama provides AI services for both content and merchandise.

Meanwhile, JD.com, the arch-rival of Alibaba, renewed its partnership with BiliBili for another 618 to combine “seeding” (种草) content and e-commerce to keep up with Taobao’s livestream content ecosystem. Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, has also begun to drum up interest for its 618 campaign with promotional livestreams to recruit merchants. Rednote, on the other hand, released a guide for merchants and streamers to prepare for the annual shopping fest.

Commentators observe that this year, preparations for 618 from major platforms started about 10 days earlier than last year. The “hardest” 618 in 2024 saw 742.8 billion RMB (101.93 billion USD) sold across platforms in total, down 7% year-on-year, and was the first ever 618 to see a decline in sales. It is little wonder that platforms have started planning earlier, and it’s worth continued monitoring to see how the new strategies will work.

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On 6 January, Douyin made the first move by announcing its 9 new measures to support its merchants. From free listings for nearly 100 merchandise categories, lowered insurance premiums and subsidising small merchants, most of the new measures are cost-saving initiatives for Douyin merchants. The platform is also updating its algorithm, introducing measures to reduce return rates, as well as cracking down on destructive competition, especially price wars.

Pinduoduo was reported to have established a committee to protect merchant rights. To show that they mean business, the chair of the committee is none other than Pinduoduo’s Executive Director and Co-CEO Zhao Jiazhen. The move comes after last year’s 10 billion RMB (1.36 billion USD) subsidies in fee waivers and cuts. The group will strive to coordinate platform management, new business, customer service, technology and product teams to study merchant needs and optimise the merchant experience.

Taobao and Tmall Group, on the other hand, has created the first-ever credit system among e-commerce platforms. This system will allow merchants to report cases of no/fake returns after a refund and other misuse cases from customers, as well as referring serious cases to the police. This credit system comes at the same time as Taobao relaxing its rules and streamlining processes for merchants. The platform will also be cracking down on “neijuan” (内卷, lit. involution, meaning useless competition).

Indeed, as e-commerce platforms shift from an absolute low-price strategy to a gross merchandise volume (GMV) -centric one, taking care of merchants has become a common factor. In fact, some of the customer-friendly rules like “refund only” policies that don’t require returns after refund created a high refund rate which hurt many merchants. With these new measures across each platform, the next sales event might be very interesting to observe as the balance between customers and merchants shifts.

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The biggest news this Double 12, (perhaps not) surprisingly, is again about a top livestreamer and mainstay of streamer gossip, Li Jiaqi. This time, netizens shared an image purported to be a screen grab of their shopping cart that shows Li’s commission rates for each item, ranging from 10% to 20%, as well as the units sold, from 3,000 and over 100,000. As the items pictured were sold for prices between 269 RMB (36.93 USD) and 419 RMB (36.93 USD), many started calculating how much Li Jiaqi made this Double 12. On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Li Jiaqi’s livestream Commission exposed” (#李佳琦直播佣金曝光#) shot to the top of the Hot Search list with a whopping 300 million views.

However, Double 12 has fared better abroad this year. In Southeast Asia (SEA) countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, 12 December, right between Black Friday and Boxing Day, is one of the biggest shopping festivals of the year. TikTok Shop reported a 274% year-on-year (YoY) growth in gross merchandise value (GMV), Malaysia and Singapore also saw 138% and 127% growth, respectively. TikTok shop gained record-breaking sales in all major SEA markets and surpassed its Double 11 results.

This year saw the normalisation of sales events. Indeed, pundits noticed that Taobao had festivals almost every month in 2024, each lasting a fortnight, making 12 December just another monthly sale with no differentiation. With fierce competition from Pinduoduo (PDD), which had the longest Double 12 this year, (almost back to back with Double 11) and Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, which saw sales in hot categories growing 300% on average. The final results of Double 12 and whether e-commerce platforms such as Taobao will continue its regular discount strategy in 2025 remain to be seen.

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The end of “absolute” low prices

The first big reversal is the race to the bottom with low prices from last year. Low prices have been key to recovery since 2023. Taobao and Tmall Group of Alibaba went as far as adding “Pricing Power” to its 5 strategies. Rival JD.com also leveraged its “10 billion subsidies” to rally merchants in a low-price competition. However, the platforms did not seem to benefit from the price war, Taobao and Tmall Group even saw its revenue drop 1% year-on-year (YoY) in Q2 2024. Since then, a focus on GMV has been established by Taobao and Tmall Group, as well as other platforms such as Douyin.

The rise and fall of “refund only” and shipping insurance

Another reversal of the “neijuan” (内卷, lit. involution) is underway. Since last year, many platforms introduced refunds without the need for return, sometimes called “refund only”. Early this year, many platforms like Douyin started mandatory “shipping insurance” which (fully or partially) reimburses the buyer’s shipping cost if a return is needed. However, both policies strained merchants while providing loopholes for unscrupulous people. The return rate has risen to over 50% to 60% for some merchants, especially in clothing. Ahead of Double 11, platforms like Kuaishou called off or adjusted its return policies.

More regulations in e-commerce

With the price war and the abuse of terms, authorities are now watching e-commerce platforms even more closely. In August, JD.com, Taobao, PDD, Douyin and Kuaishou signed an agreement regarding compliance, under the guidance of authorities from Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang. The 22-article agreement will serve as a blueprint for the future of e-commerce competition.

As we enter 2025, against the backdrop of more economic and trade uncertainties, new trends and quick reversals may be even more common. What will happen to other trends such as social commerce and shopping festivals like 618, Double 11 and Double 12 which just began, are also of interest.

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