AI e‑commerce is still accelerating — Alibaba (阿里巴巴), ByteDance (字节跳动), and Amazon (亚马逊) are all doubling down

Three different plays for the same prize

AI is no longer just a tool for personalization — it's being remade into a shopping gateway. It has been reported that ByteDance’s Doubao (豆包) quietly rolled out an in‑conversation product card that lets users view, order and pay without leaving the app, a shift that would turn Doubao’s reported 145 million daily active users into a standalone AI commerce entry point rather than a mere feed. Meanwhile, Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has pushed its Qianwen (千问) model as a unified AI front door across Taobao, Tmall and local services, and reportedly passed 100 million monthly active users on the Qianwen app.

Walled gardens, open hunters, and a middle way

Across the Pacific, Amazon (亚马逊) is doubling down on its “walled garden” approach with Rufus — the in‑app shopping assistant embedded in Amazon’s bottom navigation. Rufus reportedly drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year and has been positioned as a reason customers will prefer a retailer‑owned agent over neutral third‑party bots. By contrast, OpenAI’s recent moves to enable commerce inside ChatGPT and to partner with Shopify, Walmart and others show the “hunter” model: an AI that aggregates across platforms and takes commissions. Alibaba’s path looks like a hybrid — an ecosystem‑level assistant that keeps fulfillment and services within its group while still offering cross‑service convenience.

Stakes, friction and geopolitics

This is not just engineering. Platform control, ad revenue and merchant economics are on the line. Retailers face a trade‑off: a recommender optimized for user fit can undercut paid advertising revenue, while open aggregators threaten to disintermediate merchants’ customer relationships. And there is a geopolitical backdrop: with U.S. export controls on advanced chips and rising tech rivalry, Chinese firms are racing to stitch AI into services and reduce dependence on foreign stacks — a factor that accelerates productization and commercialization at home. Who captures the consumer’s next default shopping interface — retailer, aggregator or AI assistant — will help define retail competition for years to come.