The logic of this year's Double 11 has completely changed.
The National Day holiday has just passed, e-commerce practitioners have already got busy before the vacation even ended.
At the beginning of October, the investment promotion rules for the Double 11 Shopping Festival on JD.com, Tmall and Douyin have been posted on the merchant backstage, listing the schedule, full-reduction offers and price protection policies one by one. Different from previous years, a familiar element is missing from the backstage this year: cross-store full-reduction offers.
In the past few years, coupons such as "¥50 off for orders over ¥300" and "¥20 off for orders over ¥200" were almost essential for major shopping promotions. What consumers needed to do was to juggle items in more than a dozen shopping carts to meet the minimum spending threshold, and in order to get discounts of dozens of yuan, they would end up buying products that were not originally on their shopping lists.
Platforms needed this artificially created sense of participation, and merchants were also accustomed to arranging their product pricing strategies around the full-reduction thresholds. This year, this mechanism has disappeared from the rules of several leading platforms at the same time, replaced by unified "official instant discount" and "official direct price cut": when a single product is ordered, the discounted price is already applied, no need to combine multiple items to meet the threshold, nor do users need to collect coupons everywhere.
Along with this change, a series of time nodes have been moved forward and the promotion cycle has been extended. JD.com set the spot sale launch at 8 p.m. on October 12, and no longer set deposit presale rules. Tmall launched the presale on October 15, and the spot sale period lasts from October 20 to November 13, which is nearly 25 days in total. The fourth batch of trade-in subsidies, the largest in scale among all batches this year, was launched in October as scheduled.
The major promotion has not officially started yet, but the entire atmosphere has already changed. If you look at the rules of all platforms together, you will find that it is not just a certain preferential strength that has been adjusted, but the internal logic that this shopping festival, which has operated for more than ten years, has relied on. It used to be a collective ritual built around impulse consumption and attention grabbing, but now its core is shifting to certainty.
01
Full-reduction Offers Exit First
The Sense of Ritual Gives Way to Transaction Efficiency
Let's look at the most noticeable change first.
In Tmall's rules this year, the entire mechanism of cross-store full-reduction and order combination has been removed, and all discounts are unified as official instant reduction. JD.com continues to implement official direct price cuts. Douyin adopts the structure of "15% official instant discount plus direct discount for one single item", and the 15% discount is borne by merchants based on the registration price.
The expressions are different, but all actions point to the same direction: the discount takes effect on a single product, and the price displayed on the order page is the final discounted price.
This set of changes seems to only remove a simple arithmetic step, but in fact it completely overturns the gameplay that has been used for many years.
In previous years of major promotions, order combination created a large number of unplanned orders. In order to meet the full-reduction threshold, consumers would add an extra item to their shopping cart just to reach the minimum spending limit, and apply for a refund after payment. Refund orders would flood in after the end of the promotion, which has almost become a fixed experience for many merchants every year. The return rate has risen, and the costs of customer service, logistics and resale have increased accordingly. The GMV on the platform's books also contains a considerable proportion of inflated data.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China announced that from January to August, the national online retail sales of physical goods increased by 4.3% year-on-year, among which daily-use goods only increased by 1.1%. When the industry was expanding at a high speed, these losses could be covered by growth. Once the growth rate slows down, the fulfillment cost of each order becomes tangible, and the complex rules change from a tool to create a lively atmosphere to a burden that drags down efficiency.
The official instant discount also has an easily overlooked implication.
It takes effect on the basis of individual stores. After merchants sign up, all products of the participating categories in their stores are automatically included, and store-level tools such as multi-item discounts are suspended during the promotion period. The price monitoring scope has been expanded simultaneously, and the practice of "raising prices first and then cutting them down" is more strictly supervised by the system. Tmall also changed the "estimated delivery time" from manually filled by merchants to algorithm calculation, and the platform will take the responsibility of compensation for overdue delivery.
The number of rules is decreasing, but the certainty guaranteed by the platform is increasing.
The adjustment of the promotion schedule follows a similar logic. This year, JD.com simply canceled the deposit presale mechanism, and launched full-category spot sales at 8 p.m. on October 12. The whole promotion is divided into five stages: spot debut, opening boom, category special session, peak period and post-promotion. Tmall retained the presale, but extended the spot sale period to nearly 25 days, set the opening boom on October 30, and the promotion will not end until mid-November. The single-day traffic peak has been flattened repeatedly, and the decision-making window for consumers has been extended continuously.
Presale used to be the core innovation of major shopping promotions. Deposits locked in demands, and final payments were released in a concentrated period, based on which platforms and merchants prepared goods in advance and arranged logistics, while consumers exchanged waiting time for lower prices. The premise for this mechanism to work is that both demand and supply need to be "predicted".
Now that JD.com has taken the lead in returning to spot sales, and Tmall has focused on a longer spot sale period, it shows that the problem of demand prediction and stock preparation has been partially solved by supply chain and data capabilities. Platforms are more willing to use the immediacy of spot goods to improve conversion rate, and consumers are no longer willing to bear more than ten days of waiting and default risk for a price-locked order.
The 618 Shopping Festival in June this year has previewed this scene. According to data from Syntun, the total transaction value of e-commerce platforms across the country during that 618 period reached 934 billion yuan, and the year-on-year growth rate dropped to 4% from about 15% in the previous year. Platforms have successively stopped announcing the total transaction value, and instead disclosed indicators such as the number of buyers and merchants. Public opinion generally feels that major promotions are less lively, but business is still going on as usual, the only difference is that the lively atmosphere is no longer necessary.
When a major promotion cannot expand the existing total demand out of thin air, its task changes from creating transaction peaks to matching consumers' decisions. Simplifying the rules to the minimum, extending the cycle to the longest, and prioritizing spot goods are all to allow consumers who have already decided to spend money to complete their purchase smoothly within the platform's system. The sense of ritual steps back, and the certainty of transaction takes the center stage.
02
Subsidies Are Targeted at Specific Groups
Resources Are Concentrated on Higher Certainty Scenarios
If the simplification of gameplay is for consumers, another set of changes takes place in areas that merchants may not notice at first glance — who pays for the subsidies and who the subsidies flow to.
Guosen Securities sorted out this change in a research report this year: the C-end subsidy burden borne by merchants on various platforms has decreased significantly, and platforms have stepped to the front stage to become the main funders of subsidies. At the same time, Taobao Tmall, JD.com and Kuaishou have all canceled the previous zero-commission policies.
Between the one reduction and one increase, universal preferential policies are being narrowed, and the subsidies and traffic in the hands of platforms are more invested in groups and scenarios with higher certainty.
High-viscosity paid members are exactly the direction of resource concentration. Taobao 88VIP was split last year, changing from a single membership to three tiers: Life Card, Shopping Card and All-in-one Card, which cover co-branded rights, shopping guarantees and full-scenario services respectively. Daily red envelopes, return freight packages and after-sales guarantee packages are packaged into the new "three guarantees" for e-commerce services.
JD PLUS celebrated its 10th anniversary in January this year. The official disclosed that in 2025, members saved nearly 300 billion yuan in total. According to JD's public statement, the annual consumption of PLUS members is ten times that of non-members. Both platforms' paid membership businesses have admitted that they are running at a loss, but neither of them has stopped investing in this sector.
This calculation is not hard to understand. The significance of membership fees does not lie in the fee itself, but it is more like a filter that first screens out the groups with the highest consumption willingness and repurchase probability, and then retains them with exclusive prices, coupon packages and co-branded rights. Platforms concentrate subsidies on members, which seems to lack the momentum of universal benefits, but in fact every penny is invested in accounts with higher repurchase and retention probability. The cost of acquiring new customers is getting higher and higher, and the return of operating an existing old member is far higher than repeatedly bidding for new users in the public domain.
There is another unavoidable variable this year: national subsidies. The fourth batch of trade-in subsidies of about 62.5 billion yuan was issued in October, which is the largest in scale and the most complete in covered categories throughout the year, and it is perfectly embedded in the Double 11 cycle.
Electronic products such as mobile phones, computers, refrigerators and color TVs can enjoy additional policy discounts on top of platform instant discounts and store coupons. The effectiveness of this path has been verified during last year's Double 11. JD disclosed that the transaction value of new mobile phone products during the promotion increased by more than 4 times year-on-year, and the transaction of new home appliance and home furnishing products increased by 150%. The combination of national subsidies and major promotions was the key driving force. This year, platforms have repeatedly emphasized that "national subsidies can be superimposed" during merchant investment, which is exactly the intention.
Different platforms have different priorities. Tmall focuses on the membership ecosystem and its basic market of apparel and beauty products, using layered rights to improve user viscosity. JD relies on self-operated businesses and logistics to undertake the trade-in demand for home appliances and 3C products, and extends the price protection period to 15 days. Pinduoduo continues to implement straightforward direct discounts and spot direct delivery, and the traffic from the 100-billion-yuan subsidy and 1000-billion-yuan support programs continues to tilt towards industrial belts and agricultural production areas. In late September, it also joined hands with more than 100 time-honored domestic brands to launch the Domestic Products Festival.
The paths are different, but the convergence direction is the same: no longer pursue satisfying all people, but invest limited resources in people and products that can bring certain transactions and certain repurchases.
According to industry insiders, this shows that the financial goals of the industry have changed. After years of exchanging losses for scale, leading platforms have repeatedly mentioned profit quality, unit economic model and merchant ecosystem health in their financial reports and conference calls. The exit of policies such as zero commission that "burn money to increase the number of merchants" and the concentration of subsidies to members and policy-supported categories are different aspects of the same main line.
Major promotions are still spending money, but the way of spending money has changed.
03
The Competition Extends Behind the Shelves
Supply, Fulfillment and a New Entry Point
With the front-stage variables such as rules and subsidies being determined one by one, let's take a look at where the competition for the market pattern in the next few years will take place.
First of all, the shelf scenario cannot be ignored. Taobao Factory and Select Domestic Products have arranged 1.6 billion yuan of special investment for this year's Double 11, and the measures are specific down to the commission level: potential merchants that meet the standards can get 50% of the category commission returned, and KA merchants can get full commission return if they successfully meet the challenge. In the reference samples disclosed by the official, a bedding merchant in Nantong achieved an incentive GMV of over tens of millions of yuan, and received millions of yuan of growth incentives.
Pinduoduo's "1000 Billion Support" program also tilts the traffic of flash sales, group buying for thousands of people, and 100-billion-yuan subsidy to high-quality supplies in industrial belts and agricultural production areas. In the past, talking about industrial belts mostly meant letting source factories "participate in major promotions"; the mechanism design this year is to turn the source supply itself into the incremental source of the promotion.
After the demographic dividend of traffic peaks out, the supply chain is a widely recognized solution. By binding factories and production origins deeper into their own systems, platforms can grasp the basic supply market for the next stage.
If the supply side is moving deeper into the shelf, the instant retail sector is expanding the fulfillment radius.
During last year's Double 11, the instant retail sector achieved a transaction value of 670 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 138.4%, which was the fastest-growing sector, and Meituan Flash Purchase ranked first. After a year, this competition around near-field scenarios has been fully upgraded. Meituan Flash Purchase launched a 300-billion-yuan commodity plan, and Wang Puzhong judged that instant retail is striding into the "commodity era".
During internal adjustments, Taobao Flash Purchase cut its C-end subsidies for food delivery by half, targeting to achieve positive unit economic profit per month in the 2027 fiscal year, while increasing B-end investment in warehouse networks and retail supplies. The store opening target for Taobao convenience stores has been raised from 1000 to 3000.
According to Jiang Fan's prediction, the transaction value of non-food instant retail will exceed that of food delivery in the next fiscal year, and it is expected to contribute more than 30% of Alibaba's domestic e-commerce transaction value in the long run.
JD has integrated five major channels including open platforms, offline channels, and instant delivery O2O. Data from the China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing shows that the number of instant delivery orders exceeded 60 billion in 2025, with Meituan and Alibaba accounting for about 51% and 42% respectively.
This set of figures shows that instant retail has gone beyond the natural extension of the food delivery business, and is regarded by all platforms as the second growth curve in addition to far-field e-commerce. The focus of competition has also shifted to "who has more complete and more exclusive products on the near-field shelves".
There is one point worth looking at from a longer time line: AI is reshaping the traffic entry point.
On the merchant side, various AI tools have been almost open for free this year, covering customer service, material generation and data diagnosis. According to platform disclosure, Tmall's Xiaomi Mi 5.0 AI customer service tool has helped merchants reduce the rate of transferring to manual customer service by more than 20%, and increase the store transaction conversion rate by more than 35%.
Changes on the consumer side have great potential: in May, Tongyi Qianwen was fully integrated with Taobao. Relying on Taobao's 4 billion product library, users can complete product selection, comparison and order placement in the dialog box, with functions such as AI virtual fitting, AI preferential calculation and AI low-price rush purchasing all available. JD launched an independent AI shopping App at the end of last year, and digital live streamers have been able to independently complete planning, live sales and post-live review.
Echoing this trend is the fading of top-tier live streamers.
In April this year, Li Jiaqi announced a temporary break from live streaming. Brands including Kans, Marubi and CHANDO have continuously reduced their cooperation with influencers, while Blue Moon and Three Squirrels even disbanded their influencer operation teams. In the first half of 2026, the number of store live streaming rooms on Douyin with transaction value over 10 million yuan increased by 78% year-on-year, and the self-operated product revenue of Eastbuy has exceeded half of its total GMV.
The influencer model featuring high slot fees, high commissions and binding exclusive lowest prices is being replaced by brand self-live streaming, small and medium-sized live streamer matrices and AI live streamers. Connecting all these clues, the trend is quite clear: the intermediate links on the transaction chain are being eliminated layer by layer by platforms and technologies.
Top-tier live streamers used to be the intermediary of traffic, and brand self-live streaming and store live streaming have taken this intermediary function back to merchants. When AI shopping guides can understand a vague description and directly complete product screening and order placement from massive commodities, the form of "browsing" itself may be rewritten. Conversational interaction has the opportunity to become a new shelf, and what may determine the ownership of traffic in the next stage is whose AI agent becomes the default tool that users open when placing orders.
The Double 11 Shopping Festival has entered its 18th year, and it is