AI Tokens Are Now a Shopping Category: 100K Sold in 30 Minutes

On the evening of November 2, China's top livestreamer sold 100,000 monthly memberships to an AI office service in half an hour. The product was not lipstick, snacks, or a phone case. It was AI tokens: prepaid computing credits that buy access to large language models. Reuters calls this the first time AI token packages have been offered as a significant consumer product category during Singles' Day. For the first time, a shopping festival is treating AI compute the way it treats phone credit: as something you can put in a cart, top up, and stock up on while the discounts last.

The moment matters because it is not a gimmick tucked inside a tech keynote. It happened on Taobao Live, in front of ordinary shoppers, during the run-up to Singles' Day on November 11, the world's largest shopping festival. And the numbers Alibaba is reporting around it are startling: AI token plan sales on its platforms rose 450 percent month-on-month in the first 20 days of October, and China's daily AI token consumption has grown roughly a thousandfold since early 2024, according to the country's National Data Administration.

The livestream: 100,000 memberships, 30 minutes, 2 trillion tokens

The host was Austin Li, the livestreamer known as the "Lipstick King" for selling vast volumes of cosmetics online. According to Reuters, the broadcast on Monday evening was the first time Li had ever sold an AI product. The featured item was the QwenWork Personal Basic monthly membership card, Alibaba's office AI service, which normally costs 28 yuan a month (about $4.20). In the stream, it went for 0.01 yuan: a symbolic price, not a real discount.

Within 30 minutes, nearly 100,000 memberships sold. Alibaba said that corresponds to roughly 2 trillion AI tokens of compute quota, and the livestream as a whole distributed a cumulative 20 trillion tokens across the products it featured. Do the rough arithmetic and each membership carried about 20 million tokens. That figure is our calculation from Alibaba's totals, not a published per-membership quota, and the company has not said exactly what a "token" means on this card versus the usage measured on developer APIs.

Chen Yusen, an Alibaba Group vice president and chief executive of QwenWork, appeared on the stream himself. Reuters reports that Li asked him whether AI could build a digital avatar of the host to chat with fans around the clock. Chen's answer: AI could not replace Li, but it could handle everyday tasks so people spend more time with their families.

What "AI tokens" actually are when you buy them at retail

A token, in the retail sense used on these storefronts, is the smallest unit of measurement for the information a large model processes and generates. On developer APIs, tokens are priced precisely: input and output rates are published per million tokens. On a consumer storefront, the token disappears into a subscription card or a fixed quota, and you buy the package, not the unit.

The formats on sale fall into two families. Some vendors sell cycle-based cards (daily, weekly, monthly, and annual subscriptions that refill on a schedule). Others sell fixed token quotas: a set amount of compute you draw down until it expires. On Tmall, both are delivered the way phone credit is delivered: either topped up directly to the account you bought with, or as a redeemable card code. You search "Token" in the Taobao app to reach the dedicated section, and the checkout flow is deliberately designed to feel like topping up a phone plan or buying a streaming membership.

Where the shelves are: Tmall's AI Token Center and JD's rival hall

Alibaba's Tmall launched its AI Token Center (known in Chinese as AI空间站, roughly "AI Space Station") on September 3, 2026. According to Alibaba's own festival briefing, it now offers consumer token plans from the flagship stores of Alibaba Cloud, Z.ai, and MiniMax, with Kimi and Moonshot also selling through the hub. JD.com opened its own "AI Software Top-up Hall" the same month, gathering Zhipu AI's GLM products, DeepSeek, ByteDance's Doubao, and Tencent Cloud. Both platforms are also selling AI-enabled laptops, learning machines, smart speakers, and AI glasses in the same stores, so shoppers can buy the hardware and the compute in one place.

This is not a single flash sale. The token category has been trading since September: China Daily reported that Zhipu AI moved first, opening a Tmall flagship store a day before the center's launch and putting its GLM Coding Plan on the virtual shelves. Its individual subscriptions range from 118 yuan a month (about $17.69) to 1,078 yuan a month (about $161.59) across Lite, Pro, and Max tiers, and searches related to those products jumped 40-fold from the previous day when the store opened. MiniMax and Kimi were still in discussions with Tmall about running their own direct storefronts as of early November.

JD's lineup skews toward a different vendor set. DeepSeek and Z.AI appear there alongside ByteDance's Volcano Engine, per Reuters, so the two platforms are assembling competing token aisles rather than identical catalogs.

The numbers behind the category

Alibaba's headline figures are worth reading carefully, because some are company-reported and some carry caveats:

• 450 percent month-on-month growth: Alibaba says sales of AI token plans from October 1 to October 20 soared 450 percent from the previous month, and that transaction value in Taobao's token category rose 450 percent on the first day of the festival's sales window, October 20. Both are Alibaba's own figures.
• 300 percent laptop surge: sales of AI personal-computer laptops rose more than 300 percent year-on-year in the first hour of the checkout period, the company said. Like most Singles' Day superlatives, this one comes from the platform selling the goods.
• 140 trillion tokens a day: China's National Data Administration said daily token consumption reached 140 trillion in March 2026, up from about 100 trillion late last year and roughly 1,000 times the level at the start of 2024. That is a government statistic, not a vendor claim, and it explains why the category suddenly looks like retail: the volume is enormous.
• $255 billion of festival scale: Singles' Day, which has run since 2009, earned 1.70 trillion yuan (about $255 billion) across platforms last year, per third-party data provider Syntun, cited by Reuters. AI tokens are a rounding error in that total, for now.

How consumer token prices compare to what developers pay

Here is where the shopping math gets interesting, and where you should not take the numbers at face value.

Two things stand out. First, the consumer packs and the API rates are barely comparable. A developer buying Qwen3.8-Max at roughly $2 per million input tokens, per an independent October 2026 price read, can calculate exactly what a million tokens costs. A consumer buying a 28-yuan monthly card gets a quota whose per-token value Alibaba does not publish. On Alibaba Cloud's own Token Plan, the credit-to-token exchange rate is deliberately unpublished, which one independent analysis described as pricing "in a currency whose exchange rate is unpublished." You cannot convert a membership card into a token count and compare it fairly against a rival's card. That opacity is the single most important pricing caveat in the whole category.

Second, the international and Chinese editions are different products at different prices. QwenWork's international site lists Plus at $20 a month and Pro at $40 a month, both metered in credits. The 28-yuan card Li sold is the China edition's Personal Basic tier. If you are outside China, the Taobao token aisle is mostly not for you: it requires a Taobao account, payment in yuan, and top-up to a phone number bound to that account.

The catch: what nobody puts on the product page

Omdia chief analyst Lian Jye Su gave Reuters the two-sided case in one breath. On one side: Chinese consumers are now heavy users of AI productivity tools, frequent users run short of credits, and buying during a sale is, in his words, "a very reasonable action," especially since the tokens' relatively long expiry periods encourage stockpiling. On the other: rapid changes in AI products may make consumers wary of prepaying for services that could be replaced or retired. A 12-month token card is a bet that the model, the app, and the vendor all still exist, and still look the same, when you get around to using it.

There are four more caveats worth stating plainly:

• We don't know the real discount. Reuters explicitly notes it was unclear how much the token plans were discounted from normal prices. The 0.01-yuan livestream price is a loss-leader stunt; it tells you nothing about what the plans cost on a normal Tuesday.
• Token plans are vendor-locked. Tokens bought from MiniMax's store do not work on Moonshot's models. Unlike phone credit, which buys network access wherever you roam, these credits buy into one company's ecosystem. The per-token value is not published, so you cannot comparison-shop across vendors on price.
• Subscriptions and quotas are easy to confuse. A monthly card that refills and a fixed quota that expires look similar in a shopping cart. Shoppers used to Netflix-style subscriptions may not realize a fixed-quota card can run dry mid-month or that an annual card locks them to a product generation that may be outdated by spring.
• Someone is financing this. As the analyst site Finimize notes, prepaid token packs turn AI into a subscription with upfront cash: customers pay first, the provider delivers compute over time, and the sale lands on the balance sheet as deferred revenue. The seller is effectively betting that the cost of generating answers (mostly GPU time and electricity) falls faster than token prices. If inference costs do not drop as quickly as the promotional pricing assumes, margins get squeezed. That bet is the reason the discounts exist at all.

What to check before you buy a token plan

If you are browsing the token aisle this Singles' Day, or watching it from outside China and wondering whether this model reaches you, the questions that matter are simple: Is this a subscription that refills or a fixed quota that expires? Which models and apps does it cover, and which ones are excluded? When exactly does it expire, and what happens to unused credit? Is there a published per-token or per-credit rate, or are you buying a black box? And does the vendor's own store offer the same plan cheaper than the festival listing? Because this year's "sale" may be repriced to look like one.

The deeper shift is the one China Daily spotted back in September: computing services are being packaged as standard consumer products that users can search for, compare, and buy like a phone data plan. For years, AI access was sold either as a chat subscription (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro) or as developer plumbing (API tokens). The token center is a third channel: retail compute, sold by the card. Whether it travels beyond China will depend on whether Western platforms want to sell API access the way phone carriers sell airtime. Nobody has tried that yet. This November, someone finally is.

What is an AI token?

A token is the smallest unit of measurement for the information a large language model processes and generates. On developer APIs, tokens are priced precisely per million. On consumer storefronts like Tmall's token center, tokens are bundled into subscription cards or fixed quotas, and the per-token value is usually not published.

Where can consumers buy AI token packages?

In China: Tmall's AI Token Center (search "Token" in the Taobao app), which sells plans from Alibaba Cloud, Z.ai, MiniMax, Kimi, and Moonshot; and JD.com's AI Software Top-up Hall, which carries Zhipu AI's GLM plans, DeepSeek, ByteDance's Doubao, and Tencent Cloud. Delivery is by direct account top-up or redeemable card code, in yuan, tied to a Chinese account.

Are the Singles' Day token deals actually cheaper?

Unclear. Reuters reports it was not known how much the plans were discounted from normal prices, and the headline 0.01-yuan livestream price was a promotional stunt on a card normally priced at 28 yuan. Most token products this year are priced in line with their official websites, according to Chinese financial press, so check the vendor's own store before assuming the festival price is a bargain.

Do AI tokens expire?

Usually, yes, and the terms differ by format. Subscription cards (daily, weekly, monthly, annual) refill on a schedule, while fixed token quotas run down until they hit their expiry date. Omdia's analyst notes that relatively long expiry periods encourage stockpiling, but warns that prepaying for fast-changing AI services carries the risk of the product being replaced or retired before you use the balance.

Can I buy AI token packages outside China?

Not through these storefronts. The Tmall and JD token sections require Chinese accounts, yuan payments, and top-up to a phone number bound to that account. Outside China, the closest equivalents are chat-app subscriptions like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, and developer API accounts with prepaid credits. Neither is sold as retail token cards.

Sources: Reuters · Alibaba Group · China Daily · Marketing-Interactive · BigGo Finance · Finimize · QwenWork pricing · Ai Miracle Qwen review · Model Spend Arena

For context on how token marketplaces price on the enterprise side, see our coverage of KT's Token Factory; for raw developer-side rates, our DeepSeek V4.1 Flash pricing breakdown; and for the consumer chat-subscription side of the same spend, our roundup of 7 AI agents you can text.