From nuts to computing power, how ambitious is the e-commerce industry's push for product standardization?

Are e-commerce platforms turning high-threshold products in various fields into ordinary commodities?

For example, Pinduoduo turns Sam's products that originally require a membership card and in-store access into no-threshold online purchases through online personal shopping agents.

For another example, Tmall has launched a top-up center, making large model computing power originally targeted at developers into clearly priced daily passes and monthly subscriptions.

On one side is brick-and-mortar retail that builds access thresholds relying on membership cards and large-pack products, and on the other side is cutting-edge AI technology that relies on professional parameters and enterprise contracts for delivery. Two fields that had no intersection at all are now fully integrated into the search, price comparison and add-to-cart processes of e-commerce shelves.

This may just be the beginning, and more thresholds are being eliminated by e-commerce shelves.

01

The same shelf logic accommodates Sam's nuts and AI Tokens

In fact, as early as 2024, searching for "Sam's" on Pinduoduo would display an exclusive dark-background page for high-quality branded products.

At that time, the page included 121 related products with total sales of 3.17 million units, covering all star SKUs such as roasted nuts, selected wild walnut kernels, and black truffle ham soda crackers. Even two types of Sam's wine broke into the top ten best-selling original-bottle imported wines on the platform.

What is more noteworthy is the price. Comparisons show that as many as 27 products are priced lower than the in-store member price. For example, the 250g donkey-hide gelatin block costs 298 yuan at the in-store member price, but only 259 yuan on Pinduoduo, 13% cheaper.

None of these products are officially distributed by Sam's. In addition to its own channels, Sam's has long only settled on JD.com, and there is no official flagship store on Taobao. The supply of goods almost all comes from personal shopping agents.

This model has continued to this day, and a more "AI" oriented product has recently appeared on Tmall's shelves.

Tmall has officially launched the "AI Space Station" (Token Top-up Center), with Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu AI, Kimi and MiniMax connected in the first batch. It has launched periodically subscribed Token Plans, Coding Plans, and usage-based top-up packages, supporting card password redemption or direct top-up.

Zhipu AI has taken the lead in opening an official flagship store. The monthly fee for personal plans ranges from 118 yuan to 1078 yuan, and the monthly payment for standard team seats is 598 yuan. Third-party shops break down the products into finer granularity: Kimi's daily pass is priced at 8.8 yuan, MiniMax's daily pass is 4.8 yuan and monthly pass is 55 yuan, all delivered in the form of card passwords. Users only need to enter "token" in the Taobao search box and click "Buy Now" to place an order.

Whether it is heavy physical snacks or extremely light digital computing power, the heavy thresholds that originally stood between them and the public have been dismantled by e-commerce shelves in the same way into clearly priced standard products.

What on earth is the force that makes these two products with completely opposite attributes converge on e-commerce platforms?

02

The impulse of personal shopping agents, the anxiety of manufacturers and the deliberate strategy of platforms

This scenario can emerge at the same time thanks to the respective driving forces of the supply side, demand side and platform side.

Looking first at the supply side, Sam's business in China has expanded to a considerable scale.

Its sales revenue exceeded 140 billion yuan in 2025, with a year-on-year increase of about 40%. As of June 2026, it has 67 stores and more than 10.7 million paid members.

However, no matter how fast the offline expansion is, it cannot catch up with consumers' curiosity about Sam's products, and the huge gap between supply and demand naturally leaves room for personal shopping agents to survive.

It is the pressure of breaking through the original business boundary and realizing monetization that gives rise to distribution demands, while the anxiety of large model manufacturers is another version of the story.

China's daily average Token call volume has exceeded 140 trillion times. Compared with 100 billion times at the beginning of 2024, the figure has increased by more than 1000 times in two years. IDC predicts that the total Token consumption in 2026 will be about 40 quadrillion times, about 20 times higher than that in 2025.

However, no matter how fast the call volume grows, if it is only limited to the B-end circle of enterprises and developers, the monetization ceiling is still clearly visible.

Putting subscription services on Tmall's shelves is an inevitable choice for large model manufacturers to actively reach the massive C-end public and expand their paying user base.

Then look at the demand side. The core demand of ordinary consumers is "lightweight and no access threshold".

The public's consumption psychology is very pragmatic. Light users neither want to spend 260 yuan on a membership card just to try a few packs of nuts, nor want to sign a heavy monthly auto-renewal contract just to occasionally use top-tier AI.

Offline, some consumers drive half an hour specially to the store to buy snacks, only to find that the same product is cheaper on Pinduoduo after getting the membership card. This gap essentially stems from the public's natural resistance to the "payment access threshold". On Tmall, the brand search volume of Zhipu AI surged 50 times within 48 hours after its settlement, directly driving the transaction volume of AI Token subscription products on the platform to rise by more than 160% month-on-month.

Behind the figures are a large number of ordinary people who used to hold a wait-and-see attitude towards AI, who completed their first low-cost trial through several-yuan daily passes and monthly passes. In the future, such computing power subscriptions may be compared for price and bought on demand more easily by users, just like phone top-up packages.

Finally, look at the platform side. Under the stock competition, it is necessary to open up new high-frequency trading categories.

The platform's commercial plan was laid out even earlier. In March this year, Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, personally led the coordination, integrating core forces including Tongyi Lab, the MaaS business line, Qianwen and Wukong, to set up the overall front related to Alibaba Token Hub, aiming to connect "Token creation, Token delivery and Token application" into an end-to-end complete ecological link.

The Tmall Token Top-up Center launched in September is the key implementation of this strategy on the retail transaction side. Against the background that the growth of traditional physical SKUs has hit the ceiling, whoever takes the lead in converting emerging non-standard services such as digital computing power into standardized, price-comparable and repurchasable e-commerce products will be able to lock the next round of high-frequency transactions firmly in its own closed-loop ecosystem.

03

Behind the standardization, are the business rules changing?

The combined force of supply, demand and platforms has promoted the same evolution: e-commerce is no longer just selling ordinary physical goods, but also turning various threshold-bearing services into standard products that can be delivered instantly. However, in this process, the original business rules have also changed to a certain extent.

Sam's membership system originally built barriers relying on exclusivity and membership thresholds.

The 260-yuan membership fee is not only an access threshold, but also represents the consumption habits of specific customer groups. Now, relying on e-commerce and logistics networks, personal shopping agents allow non-members to easily buy its individual products, which to a certain extent dilutes the original member segmentation.

Facing this external circulation, Sam itself is also accelerating its online layout as a response. It has nearly 500 front warehouses and ultra-fast delivery cloud warehouses, with online sales accounting for more than 50% of the total.

The changes in large model services are more direct. Computing power and APIs were originally mainly delivered to enterprises and developers, with strong technical attributes and professional thresholds.

After entering e-commerce platforms, it begins to directly face public price comparison. At present, the price of the same tier of packages sold in the official flagship store of Alibaba Cloud is basically consistent with that on the official website, with only tiny differences.

Third-party shops break down the products into even finer granularity, splitting the quota of models such as Kimi, MiniMax and DeepSeek into several-yuan daily passes or monthly passes, and the delivery method is also converted into redemption codes just like point cards.

The core of large model manufacturers testing e-commerce channels is to lower the trial threshold and extend their service targets from professional developers to the general public.

Whether it is the membership threshold of physical retail or the technical delivery form of large models, they are finally transformed into clearly priced, directly orderable standard products on e-commerce shelves.

04

Insights from Jutou Finance

Removing access thresholds is becoming a business worthy of re-evaluation

Whether it is Sam's membership fee or the technical parameters of large models, in front of the huge traffic and transaction closed loop, they are all abstracted into "goods" that can be searched, price-compared and ordered with one click.

E-commerce platforms, with their invincible "standardization" capability, are becoming the ultimate eliminator of all commercial barriers. The right to formulate business rules is shifting from the supply side (brands/technology parties) "setting thresholds" to the demand side (consumers/platforms) "simplifying thresholds".

For Sam's, the proliferation of personal shopping agents is a leakage of brand premium, and also an opportunity to force it to accelerate omni-channel integration; for Alibaba, the Token Top-up Center is by no means a simple function, but a key entry for it to seize the "water, electricity and internet" infrastructure in the AI era, aiming to lock high-frequency computing power consumption in its own ecosystem.

When the exclusivity of the membership system is disintegrated by the universality of e-commerce, and the professionalism of technology is absorbed by the ease of use for the public, the future commercial moat will no longer depend on how high a wall you set, but on whether you can deliver complex value to the widest group of people at the lowest cost and the fastest speed.

Removing access thresholds is becoming a business worthy of re-evaluation.

Partial reference materials:

1. Why does Sam not crack down on personal shopping agents?

2. Sam's private products "rush to the top" on e-commerce platforms, and membership store personal shopping agency services have become an industrial chain

3. Pinduoduo launches a "Sam's Club", 400 million middle-class people pay close attention to the new model

4. In-depth analysis of the 2026 warehouse membership store industry: market size, competition pattern, channel dividends and head brand sorting

5. Tmall launches Token Top-up Center, with Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu AI, Kimi and MiniMax connected in the first batch

6. Large model packages are on the shelves of Tmall, whose payment orders are AI manufacturers competing for?

7. China's MaaS market enters a period of rapid growth, and the Token economy moves from concept to large-scale practice

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Jutou Finance" (ID: jutoucaijing), author: Yu Bai, authorized by 36Kr for release.