(Yicai) Oct. 23 -- Tokens from leading Chinese large language model developers have entered the Double 11 shopping festival for the first time this year, but unlike the big discounts most products enjoy, token prices remain largely unchanged, with promotional campaigns seemingly more focused on using the event's popularity to secure an entry point into the market.

E-commerce platforms have been aggressively pursuing LLM developers to join them for the shopping festival, making "buy tokens on Double 11" one of their main selling points. Alibaba Group Holding's Tmall Group launched the "Artificial Intelligence Space" token recharge center last month, with Z.AI, Alibaba Cloud, and QwenWork opening stores, before MiniMax Group joined on Oct. 13. In addition, JD.Com launched its Double 11 AI token service section, attracting DeepSeek, Z.AI's GLM, and Volcano Engine's Seed among others, while Z.AI also opened a self-operated flagship store.

However, instead of "boosting token sales," e-commerce platforms have mostly focused on letting consumers know that "tokens are sold." JD.Com's self-operated flagship store for JD Cloud, MiniMax's flagship shop on Tmall, and Alibaba Cloud's official flagship store have not yet sold tokens during the festival, multiple customers told Yicai.

The price of the monthly card for Z.AI's GLM Coding Plan Lite on JD.Com dropped to CNY115 from CNY118 (USD17.22 from USD17.67) for Double 11, and fell even less on Tmall, where it stands at CNY116.90.

In addition, Tmall will not offer any specific vouchers for tokens for the time being, said President Jia Luo.

In the past, e-commerce sites subsidized brands that did not lower prices during Double 11, such as Apple, often using their platform subsidies and category vouchers to lower prices on related products.

Token sales on Alibaba's Taobao surged 450 percent on the first day of Double 11 from the previous month's average but remained low. The page information for Z.AI's GLM Coding Plan Lite on JD.Com showed only "over 100 sold" for the monthly card, while total sales of all tokens on Z.AI's flagship store on Tmall reached 300, and on MiniMax's shop just over 100 tokens.

Tokens still target a specific, limited set of customers and have not yet reached the explosive potential of mass consumer goods, Orient Securities pointed out. LLM pricing methods began to differentiate this year, with prices for homogeneous general models declining while high-end models with complex reasoning abilities are starting to command premiums.

Editor: Martin Kadiev