The Double 11 is trending towards differentiation

While "everyday low prices" have already covered a large share of daily consumption, the annual Double 11 remains a major event for e-commerce platforms and numerous brands, and consumers also pay attention to it for various reasons.

This year's Double 11 did not extend its promotional cycle as before, and instant price cuts remain the core gameplay highlighted by platforms, with low prices seemingly becoming the default option — though its actual effect varies by scenario. Its more notable change lies in the fact that the demands Double 11 can accommodate, as well as the methods adopted by different parties to pursue growth during the event, are showing increasingly obvious differentiation.

This is related to multiple factors.

First, large-scale promotional events themselves are undergoing differentiation: the "everyday low price" model has diverted high-frequency restock scenarios such as paper products, household cleaning supplies, food, and maternal and infant consumables; instant retail can meet the demand for out-of-stock items in a timely manner. What large promotions still retain are the advantages of centralized supply, low prices and high exposure.

Products with strong brand awareness, premium space, high unit price, long decision-making cycle and that can be purchased on a planned basis can better use discounts, bundles, free gifts and service benefits to meet the demands of promotional nodes. Core SKUs of high-end beauty brands, large home appliances and well-known digital products are still the hard currency of large promotions; new products, limited-edition and exclusive products also need this high-exposure scenario.

During the 618 shopping festival this year, some international big brands returned to the top of the promotion rankings, which is a direct reflection of this trend: SkinCeuticals and Estée Lauder ranked top two in Tmall's beauty list, while Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein and La Mer took the top three spots in Douyin's cosmetics GMV list.

At the same time, the entire consumer market is also constantly differentiating.

Consumers are increasingly judging whether a product is worth buying based on their own needs, pain points and scenarios. Different consumers have different value priorities for efficacy, quality, aesthetics and experience in different scenarios; even the needs of the same person will show K-shaped differentiation across categories and scenarios: they are willing to pay a premium for the quality and experience of a certain category, while being cost-sensitive in other categories.

The upgrading and segmentation of consumer demands are happening at the same time, requiring brands and channels to provide more specific products and solutions. Channel differentiation has emerged accordingly. The 2025 report by Bain & Company and Consumer Insights shows that Chinese consumers buy fast-moving consumer goods through more than 7 channels on average every year. Different needs correspond to different purchase destinations, making it more difficult for a single platform to cover all consumption scenarios.

For example, thanks to their relative advantages in speed, price and product richness, e-commerce and O2O are still growing faster than the overall social retail. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that total retail sales of consumer goods increased by 1.3% in the first half of this year, while online retail grew by 4.8%.

Among offline channels, warehouse membership stores respond to consumers' dual needs for quality and cost-effectiveness, community discount stores meet the demand for nearby and cheap purchase of daily necessities such as three meals a day; snack wholesale stores, relying on low prices of a wider range of categories and a comfortable shopping experience, are increasingly becoming retail infrastructure in leisure scenarios — and these three are also the three types of channels that still maintain high growth in the entire offline retail sector, while most other traditional channels are weakening.

The essence of differentiation is that when the overall increment of the consumer market is limited, more opportunities come from the growth brought about by structural reshaping. All parties are striving for the budget transferred by consumers from other channels and brands by meeting demands in a more refined way. Brands and channels are also re-evaluating budget allocation.

Therefore, returning to Double 11, each platform not only needs to respond to consumers' new demands for large promotions, but also give full play to its own advantages in channel differentiation, and provide consumers with clearer reasons to choose itself during the promotion period. When both brands and platforms incorporate large promotions into their annual operations, Double 11 becomes a concentrated embodiment of their annual business strategies.

Among these differentiations: as a shelf e-commerce platform, Taobao Tmall still organizes supply around best-selling products of major brands, official flagship stores and 88VIP, and uses AI to strengthen service and matching; Douyin, as the leader of content e-commerce, expands its traffic pool through short dramas and top creators, and improves matching efficiency through content stratification; based on its nature of half-platform and half-retail, JD amplifies its supply chain and service fulfillment capabilities; as community e-commerce platforms, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu continue to give full play to the value of community content, user-selected products and professional buyers.

AI is the next variable that all parties are investing in, but it has not yet had a decisive impact on traffic entrances, consumer decision-making and market share restructuring.

01

Tmall: Capture more potential and long-term opportunities with flagship stores + AI

The differentiated features of shelf e-commerce are the points that Tmall has been committed to emphasizing to the outside world in the past two years: full life cycle management of products, full width of shelves, support for cross-platform marketing resources, full life cycle operation of consumers, and the ability to define new products based on data and user insights.

This Double 11, Tmall's emphasis on new products, flagship stores, 88VIP and AI is also to further give play to these advantages: gather brands, new products and services through flagship stores, improve the efficiency of demand discovery and product matching with AI, and then strive for a larger share of users' wallet around 88VIP.

Brand operation has always been Tmall's core competence and exclusive advantage. In August this year, when overseas sports brand ALO took Tmall flagship store as its first stop to enter the Chinese market, it said: "We value brand building more than just sales volume, and Tmall can help us build long-term brand influence."

At the 2026 Tmall Golden Beauty Awards event in September, Ji Yun, General Manager of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Division of Taobao Tmall and Tmall Luxury Division, also mentioned: "The (beauty) industry has entered a new stage of development. Mature brands are still the core, foundation and mainstay of our entire business, and they have returned to the fast track of growth this year."

The latest 2026 Tmall Double 11 war report released by "Taobao Tmall Express" also shows that 4 hours after the sale started, the transaction value of 124 brands exceeded 100 million yuan, and the transaction value of 27,681 brands exceeded the full-day figure of last year.

Flagship stores are the main venue for brand operation.

During Double 11, flagship stores can first meet consumers' demands for brand new launches, limited-edition products and differentiated services. According to platform disclosure, one month before the sale started, the number of merchants that launched new products first on Taobao Tmall increased by 64% year-on-year; there are 50,000 super SKUs and 2,000 flagship store exclusive products in this Double 11.

ALO also launched the global new Accolade series on Tmall Double 11 for the first time, the official Apple flagship store allows consumers to use consumption coupons on accessories for the first time, and SkinCeuticals combines skin care products with offline beauty experiences. The participation of embodied intelligent products and Token services in Double 11 not only reflects more complete and top-tier supply, but also reflects the value of large promotions as a "marketing window" for brands. In actual experience, the discount coupons provided by Tmall are more applicable to big brands and top-tier products.

The homepages of ALO and CHANDO's Tmall flagship stores have obvious Double 11 elements, and PANE is highlighting new products

Secondly, Tmall hopes to use AI to enable flagship stores to have stronger capabilities to help brands discover new crowds, find new opportunities and improve long-term operations, and upgrade to the so-called "super flagship", so that one search and one single product transaction can extend to more supplies of more brands.

Previously, various AI tools of Alimama have helped brands discover more marketing opportunities. For example, when the beauty brand CHANDO promoted its milk cushion foundation, it used "Wanxiang Dianjing" to discover the "exquisite life lovers" group outside the conventional base makeup user group, and was inspired to find the new group of "morning commuters", realizing user group expansion.

Of course, the important foundation for the establishment of this "flagship store + AI" operation model is that Taobao Tmall has covered nearly 1 billion consumers, and there are about 64 million 88VIP members as of June this year. Jia Luo, President of Tmall, said at this year's Double 11 press conference that active members of the platform buy about 15 categories a year, and 88VIP members buy about 30 categories, and there are still a large number of unmet demands, which are all potential incremental space for brands on Tmall.

This year, in addition to continuing to issue large full-reduction coupons to 88VIP, Tmall has also added a self-selected expansion gameplay. Giving more rights and interests to 88VIP, in essence, is Tmall's effort to capture the upward demand that is constantly changing in the K-shaped differentiation of consumer demand.

Ji Yun has previously used the metaphor of "upper floor" to describe such opportunities: the same person may only be willing to pay a premium in certain categories, occasions or life stages, but if this part of the opportunity is expanded, its space is actually very broad. For example, many male users' consumption attitude in most daily necessities belongs to the lower half of the K-shaped differentiation, but their consumption in sports outdoor and digital fields is obviously in the upper half of the K, because these are their areas of interest.

What Tmall wants to strive for by serving 88VIP is the "upper floor" share of wallet of such people in corresponding categories and scenarios.

02

Douyin: Expand traffic pool and stratify traffic

Douyin combines content e-commerce with shelf transactions, but its underlying logic is still recommendation e-commerce: stimulate demand through content, undertake transactions through shelves, and match demands through the platform. The transaction result depends on the scale of attention, the quality of content ecology, the efficiency of conversion to purchase, and the support of the transaction link.

This year's Double 11, Douyin further focuses on expanding the traffic pool and improving traffic utilization efficiency through content stratification.

In terms of traffic, Douyin has expanded the access to consumption coupons to seven applications outside the main app, including Doubao, Hongguo Short Drama, Toutiao, and Tomato Novel, connecting AI and short dramas into the promotion traffic pool. We observed that Doubao has a default prompt of "Ask Doubao about Double 11", and some product searches come with built-in discount coupons. The traffic from Doubao usually comes with clearer demands, which may help improve matching efficiency.

In terms of content stratification, Douyin first focuses on super-head creators who have appeal, can organize product portfolios and drive centralized transactions; secondly, it supports small and medium-sized KOLs and KOCs with high-quality content capabilities, to help small and medium-sized merchants and segmented supplies stand out.

During the promotion period, super-head live streaming rooms still have the advantages of centralized traffic, preferential resource negotiation and transaction organization. Jiang Chenglan returned before the 618 shopping festival, a full makeup tutorial video was collected and revisited nearly 6 million times, and the number of viewers of her first live streaming with goods in September exceeded 10 million, once topping Douyin's total live streaming sales list, which is a typical example. Before Double 11, Xiaoyangge also returned to the live streaming room.

It is said that the traffic of this year's Douyin Double 11 will be further tilted to top creators. If this is true, it will further benefit big brands that already have mature operation experience on Douyin and still maintain a large proportion of creator live streaming. The latest Douyin Double 11 war report also shows that as of October 18, the number of merchants with transaction value exceeding 100 million yuan increased by 200% year-on-year, and the top three best-selling products in the mall are Apple iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro Max and Helena Rubinstein Prodigy Reversis Dark Spot Correcting Rich Cream.

Supporting small and medium-sized creators and segmented supplies also conforms to the trend of increasingly differentiated consumer demands. Small and medium-sized creators can meet more specific needs by sharing professional knowledge, real experience and circle trust, driving the growth of segmented supplies. The first war report of this year's Douyin Double 11 released by Douyin E-commerce on the 16th of this month focuses on these segmented creators and supplies: the number of creators whose transaction value exceeded 1 million yuan for the first time in Double 11 increased by 30% year-on-year, and the number of merchants whose transaction value newly exceeded 1 million yuan increased by 74% year-on-year.

Small and medium-sized creators are also important participants in the growth of Douyin's video-based product sales. According to Douyin, during the 618 shopping festival this year, creators with less than 1 million fans contributed more than 80% of the total transaction value of creator-led product sales.

The growth of small and medium-sized creators is inseparable from Douyin's support for professional and segmented content in recent years. This year, Douyin pays more attention to collection, revisit and continuous following in recommendation, and emphasizes scarce on-site content, user co-creation and series creation in creation support. Juliang Xingtu has also established creation and evaluation standards according to types such as product recommendation, review and creativity, allowing brands to choose content according to tasks, and enabling creators of different sizes and types to grow.

As Douyin further segments content, the operation of brands on Douyin will also become more and more refined. During the 618 shopping festival this year, international beauty brands returned to the top of Douyin's list, which is related to the refined operation of big brands on Douyin.

In May this year, Stéphane Rinderknech, CEO of Estée Lauder Group, called Douyin an "important breakthrough" when talking about China's business, saying that it allows the group to "reach more new consumers". Estée Lauder has 11 brands settled in Douyin, and has built self-broadcast positions according to different product directions to maintain daily sales, and cooperates with creators to expand reach during large promotions. Helena Rubinstein's Prodigy Reversis Dark Spot Correcting Rich Cream PX50 operated traceability, brand day and gifting content for nearly 9 months before the promotion, and used preferential product portfolios to meet demands during the promotion period.

For content e-commerce, content scale, ecological quality and transaction infrastructure are all key to the continued growth of its e-commerce business. Specifically for Douyin E-commerce, continuing to carry out segmented operation of content and optimize the ecology will also be a long-term task.

03

JD: Amplify service capabilities based on supply chain transformation

Services are inherently a part that consumers and brands are paying more and more attention to. Whether there is an extra charge for door-to-door service, whether the staff is professional, and who to turn to when problems occur will all affect purchase decisions. Tmall is also emphasizing the unified disassembly, delivery and installation standards, online tracking of fulfillment, to provide more certain services this year.

Services are even more the key word that JD has always emphasized. This year's Double 11, JD's sharing of life and production services took up nearly half of the press conference time. For consumers, JD organizes products and follow-up services together; for enterprises, it turns warehousing and distribution, procurement and technical capabilities into purchasable services.