When you slept well, the final (or apogee) buying festival 6.18 began in China.
The buying festival 6.18 traditionally the second largest net trade vacation in China after Singla Day, underwent a fundamental transformation in 2026. alternatively of the current race at the lowest prices and aggressive subsidies, leading e-commerce platforms moved the focus to technological competition.
The implementation of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models for regular interactions with consumers announces the arrival of a fresh era in digital retail, in which quality of recommendation, alternatively than size of discount, determines the success of sales.
This phenomenon fits into sBeijing's lower priorities, aiming to decision distant from destructive innovation-based growth price competition.
Guidelines issued in April 2026 by six ministries chaired by the Ministry of Trade directly encourage deep integration of AI into e-commerce, seeing this as an chance to stimulate home request and optimise operating costs.
The marketplace reaction was immediate – the 4 largest digital ecosystems implemented their own artificial intelligence solutions, presenting different philosophies of approach to the consumer.
Phenomenon of buying holidays – from university fun to planet phenomenon
To realize the importance of the 6.18 festival, it is worth first knowing the past of Chinese purchasing holidays that do not have an equivalent in Europe or the United States. It all began with Single’s Day (Singgli Day), celebrated on 11 November. In the 1990s, Nanjing University students invented this day as an ironic celebration of solitude – 4 singles (11.11) symbolized 4 single people. For 10 years, this “loner festival” remained an unofficial, very local university custom, until 2009 erstwhile Alibaba saw immense commercial potential. Chinese giant e-commerce turned Single’s Day into a mass sale online, reserving as a trademark the word “Double 11” (Double 11).
Today it is the world's largest purchasing vacation – in 2025 gross reached 1.70 trillion Yuan (238 billion dollars), or 10 times more than the combined sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States.
In 2010, JD.com, a competitor of Alibaby, decided to make his own buying holiday. The choice of date was not accidental – June 18 (6.18) is the date Liu Qiangdong founded the company in 1998. The 6.18 festival rapidly gained popularity, becoming the second largest commercial vacation in China. In 2025, gross from run 6.18 amounted to 855.6 billion yuan ($119 billion), with JD.com processing more than 2.2 billion orders on its own. Together, the 2 festivals make about 2.56 trillion Yuan of income annually – an amount that exceeds the yearly value of eBay's full income.
For the Polish reader, who got utilized to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, these numbers may seem astronomical, but in China they are already normal, annually recurring phenomena that dominated the full ecosystem of electronic commerce and became investigating for fresh technologies, including artificial intelligence.
Two models of digital advice
The marketplace reflection reveals a clear divided into 2 concepts of AI implementation in the purchasing process.
The first, represented by Qianwen (Alibaba) and Doubao (ByteDance), is based on conversational product discovery. The AI assistant is not limited to displaying the list of results, but is proactively examining the user's intentions through dialogue, asking clarification questions and openly pointing to weaknesses in the individual options. This shifts the minute of making a decision from conventional browsing “the shelves” to the conversation window.
A completely different way is followed by JD.com with its JD AI Gou app. This solution imposes a chat interface on the conventional search engine. alternatively of a circumstantial dialogue, the strategy generates a wide scope of recommendations divided into functional categories. Although this approach preserves the user-friendliness of filtering results, it carries hidden risks. Tests conducted by independent investigation centres have shown that a strategy oriented towards maximising the scope of the advice can attribute to products characteristics which they do not actually have, which may undermine consumer assurance in the long term.
Closed data loop as final advantage
In a race for dominance in trade supported by artificial intelligence, the quality of the language model itself (LLM) goes to the background. Experts foretell that the leading algorithms will scope a akin technological level over the next fewer months.
The player who most effectively closes the information cycle between authentic user content (UGC) and transaction data will gain a real competitive advantage.
Currently, ByteDance is closest to this goal. The Doubao model can draw in real time from the giant review database and product videos posted on the Douyin platform, combining them straight with the past of purchases at TikTok Shop. This creates a self-propelled mechanism: better recommendations lead to more transactions that in turn make fresh valuable training data for AI. The only serious challenger for this model seems to be Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), having an unrivalled review base in terms of fashion and beauty, although this platform inactive needs to prove its effectiveness in converting users' engagement to real sales.
Development artificial intelligence in Chinese e-commerce is simply a phenomenon that goes beyond the user interface itself. Algorithms optimise transportation routes today, manage warehouse states, and even run multi-hour live sales broadcasts (livestreaming) in place of human presenters. This year's 6.18 festival proved that the era of simple search for keywords is slow coming to an end, giving way to personalized, intelligent trading ecosystems.
Source:
- CIW News: “China’s 618 AI buying war” (03.06.2026), https://www.ciw.news/p/chinas-618-ai-hopping-war
- Global Times: “China’s ‘618’ buying festival goes all-in on AI, generating fresh consumption growth” (24.05.2026 ), https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1361786.shtml
- TechNode: “ByteDance’s Doubao to launch payment plans in the summertime June” (02.06.2026 ), https://technode.com/2026/06/02/bytedances-doubao-to-launch-paid-plans-in-late-june-link-with-douyin-e-commerce-push/
- Alibaba News: “2025 Double 11 buying Festival Activity Information” (30.10.2025 )
Leszek B. Glass
Email: [email protected]
