The quietest 618 in history: Why isn't the big promotion as lively as before?
This year's 618 shopping festival has passed quietly.
There are no complicated cross - store full - reduction promotions, no long - term pre - sale deposit expansion, and no "spend 300, get 50 off and then stack coupons" math problems. After more than 20 years of development, the 618 shopping festival has seen a collective "burden - reduction" this year.
However, this collective "burden - reduction" is more of a forced move rather than an active evolution of the platforms.
When billion - yuan subsidies become a regular feature and live - streamers offer the lowest prices across the network every day, the sense of scarcity that large - scale promotions rely on has long since disappeared in name only. Complicated rules are no longer tools to stimulate consumption but have instead become a frictional force that discourages users.
What's more thought - provoking is that the platforms themselves are no longer obsessed with creating a national shopping spree.
Under the triple pressures of reaching the traffic ceiling, user fatigue, and the normalization of low prices, compared with the platform's GMV during the 618 festival, a more pressing issue is whether users will open your app first in the future. Therefore, AI has been pushed to the forefront, and the competition has shifted from creating consumption impulses to competing for the next - generation e - commerce entry.
After all, AI platforms are replacing traditional search engines as the new entry point for e - commerce traffic. Whoever controls AI conversations and AI recommendations will control the shopping paths of the next - generation users.
The festive atmosphere of large - scale promotions may never return. Instead, it's a long - term covert battle about efficiency, user retention, and control of the entry point.
I. Simplifying the Rules to Reduce Resistance
This year's 618 may be the simplest in terms of rules in history.
The "pre - sale deposit expansion" and "unclear cross - store full - reduction calculations" that consumers complained about the most in previous years have almost disappeared in 2026. Major e - commerce platforms have all made simplifications, bringing the large - scale promotion back to the most basic business logic.
The Taotian Group has deepened the "official instant discount" mechanism this year, completely canceling cross - store full - reduction promotions. Most products can enjoy discounts with just one purchase. On Tmall and Taobao, users no longer need to combine products from different stores and categories into one order to meet the threshold, nor do they need to calculate "spend 300, get 50 off, then stack category coupons and 88VIP discounts". The price shown on the page is the final payment price.
Douyin focuses on "direct price cuts for single items and no need to meet the threshold". The billion - yuan consumption vouchers are available throughout the promotion. JD has not shortened the promotion period but split it into "three consecutive promotions" - the Mother's Day promotion started on May 6th, followed by the exciting shopping season and the grand opening on May 31st. At the same time, it has upgraded the "double - compensation if the price is higher" service. Pinduoduo has pioneered the "price - difference compensation" policy, covering all types of discounts, including merchant price adjustments, platform subsidies, and national subsidies.
This collective simplification is not due to the platforms' "conscience discovery" but is an inevitable result of the normalization of promotions and regulatory intervention.
On the one hand, when billion - yuan subsidies have become a regular feature, live - streamers offer the lowest prices across the network every day, and brand members enjoy monthly discounts, the sense of scarcity of large - scale promotions has long since diminished.
In the past, large - scale promotions continuously added complex pre - sales, deposit expansion, and cross - store full - reduction promotions, mainly to create a sense of scarcity and urgency, using time pressure and order - combining thresholds to stimulate excessive consumption. However, in the context of live - streamers offering the lowest prices across the network every day, the scarcity of large - scale promotions has been greatly diluted.
Complicated rules are no longer tools to stimulate consumption but have become a frictional force that accelerates user loss. The collective "cooling down" of platforms during this 618 indicates that the main battlefield of competition has shifted from "creating impulses" to "reducing resistance".
On the other hand, the attitude of the regulatory authorities is also changing.
On May 25th, the Beijing Network Market Supervision Joint Conference collectively interviewed 17 key platform enterprises, clearly stating that irrational large - scale subsidy promotions during the "6·18" period should be avoided. The previous abnormal logic of "platforms treat customers, merchants pay the bill" - where platforms use low - price gimmicks to attract traffic and merchants are forced into a vicious cycle of selling below cost - is being strongly corrected by the regulators.
Previously, the "Rules for Internet Platform Price Behaviors" implemented on April 10th this year also clearly prohibited platforms from forcing or indirectly forcing merchants to conduct promotions and strictly prohibited false price behaviors such as "raising prices first and then reducing them" and big - data price discrimination.
Does the simplification of rules mean that the pressure on merchants has disappeared?
This is another aspect that is easily overlooked. The simplification of large - scale promotion rules mainly reduces the decision - making cost for consumers, but the structural pressure on merchants has not disappeared simultaneously.
Firstly, there is the pressure of inventory preparation.
In the past, the pre - sale system allowed merchants to "produce according to sales", and pre - sale data directly guided production and inventory preparation. After the cancellation of pre - sales, merchants need to prepare inventory in advance, which increases both the financial pressure and inventory risk. The risk of overstocking caused by inaccurate sales forecasts is entirely borne by the merchants.
On the other hand, the breakthrough space for small and medium - sized merchants has been narrowed.
In the era of complicated large - scale promotion rules, refined operation was a kind of competitiveness. Now that this threshold has disappeared, the competition has returned to the original logic of price and sales volume. The platform's traffic naturally inclines towards mature merchants with data accumulation and evaluation basis, and the breakthrough space for small and medium - sized merchants has been narrowed instead.
To some extent, the essence of this year's 618 "burden - reduction" is that the platforms have shifted the competition from the front stage to the backstage. Consumers see a cleaner page and transparent prices, while merchants face a more brutal efficiency competition.
II. The Rise of AI and Preparing for the Next - Generation E - commerce Entry
If the simplification of rules is the superficial change of this year's 618, then the full - scale penetration of AI is the deep - seated variable that is truly rewriting the underlying logic of large - scale promotions.
2026 is regarded as the "Year of the First AI - Native Large - Scale Promotion". Taobao, Tmall, and JD have promoted AI from a marketing tool to the business foundation. From the shopping entry for consumers to the business engine for merchants, AI has penetrated the entire chain of large - scale promotions for the first time.
Just before the 618 festival, Taobao was fully integrated with Qianwen, opening up a new AI shopping experience. Users can open the Qianwen App, have a conversation with AI, and complete the selection, comparison, and purchase of products on Taobao. By opening the Taobao App and clicking on the "Qianwen AI Shopping Assistant", users can use AI for shopping and enjoy functions such as AI try - on, AI discount calculation, and AI low - price snatching.
Previously, Doubao had completed a similar layout. From accessing the Douyin Mall in October 2025 to officially launching the "Help You Choose" AI shopping function in May this year, Doubao has achieved full - chain integration with Douyin e - commerce. Users can directly complete the entire process of product query, price comparison, and order placement within the Doubao App without jumping to the Douyin App.
JD has also completed its layout. At the end of December last year, JD launched the independent JD AI Shopping APP, relying on its self - developed Yanxi large - model to provide an immersive conversational shopping experience. Currently, JD AI Shopping supports functions such as AI try - on and AI price comparison, which are similar to the embedded mode in the Taobao system.
This AI position - grabbing battle before the 618 festival reveals a signal: In the past two years, AI was only used in back - end auxiliary links such as customer service, shopping guides, and graphic generation. During the 618 festival in 2026, AI has officially become the core entry point for e - commerce traffic and a top - level variable that determines the future pattern.
Whoever controls AI conversations, AI recommendations, and AI price - comparison decisions will control the shopping paths of the next - generation users. However, this does not mean that users will move their shopping into the AI dialog box.
In fact, whether AI can truly become a shopping entry point depends not on its conversation ability but on whether it can completely replace the entire shopping path of "search - browse - compare prices - make a decision".
At least during this 618, this replacement is far from complete.
The most obvious bottleneck appears in the browsing stage. The search box has dominated e - commerce for nearly two decades because it can present a product list with a very high information density. Users can scan the main images, prices, and sales volume labels of more than a dozen products within a few seconds and quickly form a judgment.
AI conversations are naturally linear and have a low information density. If you ask "Recommend a noise - canceling headphone", it will give you three options. You have to read the descriptions one by one, and if you want to make a comparison, you have to ask back and forth. For shopping needs with clear goals, the efficiency of the dialog box is far lower than that of the product waterfall flow.
This means that AI shopping is more suitable for certain specific scenarios in the short term, such as the "don't know how to choose" scenario with vague needs or the "can't understand the parameters" scenario with a high knowledge threshold for product categories. However, for the "search for keywords - look at the list - click in - place an order" process that users have long - formed muscle memory of, the solutions provided by AI are far inferior to the traditional e - commerce scenarios.
The migration of consumption habits is never something that can be completed in one 618 festival.
Overseas cases are more worthy of reference. In September 2025, OpenAI announced that it would embed a shopping function in ChatGPT and cooperate with Walmart and Shopify. Subsequently, it also planned to access food delivery and taxi - hailing services. However, by March 2026, this function was taken offline.
Daniel Danker, the executive vice - president of design and product at Walmart, once disclosed that the conversion rate of users directly completing purchases within the ChatGPT chat interface was only one - third of the conversion rate after clicking the link and jumping to the Walmart official website, a decrease of about 66%.
Even in the US market with a higher AI penetration rate, consumers' acceptance of "conversational shopping" is still far lower than that of "browsing shopping".
However, even though there are still flaws in the user experience of AI shopping, platforms are still rushing to layout because the search entry is being systematically eroded.
Goldman Sachs proposed at the 2026 Shoptalk Summit that the starting point of consumers' shopping is undergoing a structural shift. AI platforms are replacing traditional search engines as the new entry point for e - commerce traffic. Gartner predicts that by 2028, the share of AI search may exceed that of traditional search.
Platforms are promoting AI shopping not for the GMV it can bring but for the fact that in the next era, whose app consumers will open first. This is an entry - point defense battle at the upstream of transaction behavior, and its symbolic significance is far greater than the current revenue contribution.
III. The 618 Shopping Festival is "Disappearing"
For consumers, an increasingly obvious change is that the 618 shopping festival still exists this year, but it is becoming less and less like the traditional 618.
The platforms are still holding large - scale promotions. The homepages are still full of "billion - yuan subsidies" and "official instant discounts", and the live - streamers are still shouting "the lowest price of the year". However, consumers' perception of the arrival of the 618 festival is significantly weakening.
In the past, the 618 festival was a highly concentrated consumption event.
Users would make shopping lists in advance, wait for the midnight, study strategies, and wait for the cross - store full - reduction promotions to take effect. The platforms would release the strongest subsidies, traffic, and marketing resources of the year. For many brands, the 618 festival even determined their performance in the first half of the year.
But now, low prices have become a daily norm.
Pinduoduo's daily low prices, Taobao's billion - yuan subsidies, and the long - term "lowest prices across the network" in Douyin live - streams are constantly diluting the sense of scarcity of large - scale promotions. In the past, consumers would wait for the 618 or Double 11 festivals to place orders, but now they are more inclined to "buy when the price is low".
The most core value of large - scale promotions is not just about being cheap but about creating a clear reason for consumption.
Through mechanisms such as pre - sales, time limits, deposit expansion, and cross - store full - reduction promotions, it creates a sense of urgency of "you'll lose out if you miss today", concentrating the originally scattered consumption needs and releasing them at a few fixed time points.
However, when low prices become a daily occurrence and subsidies become the norm, this concentrated release is gradually losing its effectiveness.
More and more consumers are starting to find that the 618 festival may not offer the lowest prices of the year, and the Double 11 festival may not be much cheaper than usual. To some extent, the 618 festival is changing from a "concentrated and explosive consumption event" to a large - scale daily promotion.
The 618 festival is still important, but it is no longer special.
Behind this change is actually an inevitable result of the entire Chinese e - commerce industry entering the mature stage.
In the past decade or so, the most important task of e - commerce platforms was to acquire incremental users. Therefore, they needed to continuously create super nodes, super low prices, and super subsidies to promote the rapid growth of GMV.
But today, the Internet traffic has reached the ceiling, consumers are gradually getting tired of low prices, and the regulators are starting to restrict irrational subsidies. The focus of competition among platforms has shifted from who can create more GMV to who can retain users in the long term and who can seize the next - generation e - commerce entry point.
This is why, on the one hand, the 618 festival is becoming less and less grand, and on the other hand, platforms are frantically betting on AI shopping.
After more than 20 years, the 618 festival is slowly losing its special status as a national consumption spree. It has not disappeared but is becoming a part of daily life.
Author: Xiang Qing, Editor: Jia Xin