Produced by | Bullet Finance

Designed by | Qianqian

Reviewed by | Songwen

"The era of AI e-commerce has just begun, presenting both opportunities and challenges to everyone." Last year, Jack Ma made this observation, and Alibaba also identified two major strategies for the year - user-centricity and AI-driven.

Similarly, Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly stated that every business unit within Amazon, such as retail, online advertising, streaming entertainment, cloud services, consumer electronics, and virtual assistant Alexa, is advancing AI-related projects.

With the integration of AI and the e-commerce industry, global e-commerce, which has been stuck in homogenous low-price competition, has found a new solution. AI is driving both supply and demand from the previous "recommendation" to the current "matching" in terms of operations, supply chain, and consumers, profoundly transforming the e-commerce industry.

1. What AI e-commerce benefits have brands discovered with the support of Alimama?

Looking back at the development of the e-commerce industry, it has always been a history of change driven by new technologies that have advanced both supply and demand. Different technology-dominated stages have brought different benefits.

Entering the era of AI e-commerce, at the Alimama Future Business Awards ceremony, Shu Yang, General Manager of Taobao Tian Group's Alimama Commercial Operation Center and Marketing Department, proposed that consumption has entered a new era of value-based consumption, with a more diverse definition of consumption value. Online browsing frequency has surged, but the time spent on a single product or content is getting shorter and shorter. How to quickly and accurately reach consumers amidst vast amounts of high-frequency browsing presents both opportunities and challenges. AI technology is a powerful tool for gaining growth benefits under the current consumption trends. "The platform will continue to innovate business products with AI capabilities, strengthen new business mechanisms, enhance customer capabilities, and make Alimama a deterministic path for merchants and the platform to grow together. Full-site promotion is the most powerful growth lever among them," said Shu Yang.

Among the winning cases of the Future Business Awards, "Interface News · Bullet Finance" has also uncovered some new benefits:

Firstly, current niche trends, industry trends, and potential best-sellers are more easily captured by AI-driven insights.

AI-driven deep business insights can empathize with consumers at the intersection of diverse industries such as apparel, beauty, personal care, home furnishing, mother and baby, fast-moving consumer goods, and more. Trends that merchants were previously unsure of or unable to accurately predict can now be anticipated by AI, enabling them to fight a "prepared battle".

Chowsangsang, an established gold jewelry brand that won the Future Business Award for Pioneer Brand in Omnichannel Operations, successfully penetrated the Z generation customer base with the support of Alimama. In terms of products, leveraging IPs such as Pop Mart and Sanrio, it ignited the consumption enthusiasm of the Z generation, with new customers contributing over 90% of sales during last year's Super Brand Day. In terms of advertising, with the support of Alimama's AI capabilities, Chowsangsang utilized a serialized combination of UD advertising, Omnichannel, and Brand Showcase marketing tools, focusing on media channels preferred by young people, achieving a three-fold increase in sales from the Z generation year-on-year.

Secondly, AI is breaking the "experience-only" marketing paradigm, strengthening or even reconstructing brands' omnichannel marketing strategies.

As AI enables more extreme, real-time, and precise "person-product matching," many brands are beginning to rely on technology for decision-making, strengthening their brand positions, and breaking growth boundaries.

For example, in marketing decisions, L'Oreal Paris leverages the AI decision-making model jointly created with Alimama to make precise decisions and rapid optimizations in media strategies throughout the marketing lifecycle, ensuring that every step has a data-driven basis, seizing opportunities, and improving business certainty. In AI advertising, L'Oreal Paris utilizes Alimama's AI products such as Bailing and Wanxiangtai to integrate brand and effectiveness throughout the consumer's entire e-commerce journey, accelerating the acquisition of stable high-conversion results for brand growth.

Under this new technological transformation, the collaboration between L'Oreal Paris and Alimama has also pioneered the first round of benefits brought by AI e-commerce for the brand. To date in 2024, L'Oreal Paris has maintained its position as the top fast-moving consumer goods brand on Taobao, with its ampoule masks ranking first in the facial mask category on Tmall.

Thirdly, the foundation of marketing is content, and AI e-commerce is accelerating content creation and innovation.

Everyone knows about AIGC's creativity. Under the guidance of Alimama's digital capabilities, brands are leveraging AIGC in various forms such as creative images, short videos, and live streams to achieve leaps in content creation.

Through Alimama's Wanxiang Lab AIGC capabilities, L'Oreal Paris has conducted numerous creative experiments, accelerating the speed of creative iteration. The click-through rate of AI creative materials has steadily improved compared to native creative CTR. There is also the emerging brand Yurongchu, which won the Breakthrough Award for Growth. Leveraging Alimama's AI digital capabilities, it quickly captured the category mindset for sensitive skin essences through omnichannel marketing collaborations with the Spring Festival Gala, celebrities, and top influencers. It then strengthened consumer brand awareness within the platform through Taobao's diverse content channels and Alimama's AI products. Finally, through internal and external collaboration, it precisely reached out to high-potential audiences for efficient conversions. As a result, GMV for essence products exceeded 2 million, representing a 130% year-on-year growth, driving overall store GMV growth of over 100%.

It is evident that the award-winning brands have leveraged Alimama's AI business environment to streamline the content seeding, scientific decision-making, and conversion process. These benefits brought by AI e-commerce are not just "localized intelligence" but a comprehensive upgrade from technology, products, to merchant empowerment.

Among the benchmark merchants, there are both large and emerging brands, all equally releasing new possibilities for business growth. Their success also signifies that even merchants lacking technological capabilities can leverage AI under the guidance of Alimama to drive new growth.

2. Returning to operations, what opportunities does Taobao AI e-commerce offer?

In the past, during the Internet and mobile Internet eras, the vision of "making business easier for everyone" relied on platform and market drivers. However, in an era where Internet traffic dividends need to be continuously mined, all considerations regarding traffic conversion ultimately need to return to the "essence of business" - the significance of AI e-commerce lies not only in business growth but also in operational efficiency.

Every improvement in operational efficiency across each chain, when combined, will create a "multiplier effect." Therefore, Alimama is using AI to penetrate "omnichannel operational services" to help merchants seize new business opportunities within the Taobao traffic ecosystem.

From a user experience perspective, the Taobao App is becoming "smarter and more personalized." Alimama has launched the LMA large model, which can dissect Taobao's comprehensive and vast product corpus, data, selling points, and demands to help merchants gain a deeper understanding of e-commerce content. Additionally, the LMA large model can precisely understand user behaviors and interests across multiple modalities such as images, videos, and live streams, enabling deeper consumer demand prediction and person-product matching.

From a merchant operation perspective, Alimama continues to iterate on product tools to help merchants penetrate multiple scenarios and meet multi-objective business needs.

Last year's "one-stop marketing advertising system" Wanxiangtai Unbounded Edition and "AI creative production tool" Wanxiang Lab are being rolled out on a large scale. The "Alimama Full-Site Promotion" launched earlier this year also achieved significant results during the 618 shopping festival. The core advantage of full-site promotion lies in the system's ability to connect the entire link between paid and organic traffic, thus activating global traffic.

At the awards ceremony, Alimama announced the latest product application results of its revolutionary new product, "Full-Site Promotion." Data shows that during Tmall's 618 shopping festival, compared to similar products without investment, products tested with full-site promotion brought merchants a 105% increase in leveraged traffic and a 43% increase in leveraged sales, helping 130首批内测商家 achieve sales of over 10 million yuan, with over 10 brands such as Midea, Lenovo, Dreame, and tineco adding more than 50 million yuan in sales. Over 1.5 million products captured traffic across the platform, with a week-on-week average increase in GMV of over 65% after the investment.

By revolutionizing business with AI technology, Alimama provides a deterministic path for merchants and the platform to grow together. With the pay-free linkage mechanism activating global traffic, full-site promotion has become a new lever for merchants' business growth. Yuan Mu, General Manager of Taobao Tian Group's Alimama Commercial Product Center, also revealed that "Alimama Full-Site Promotion has completed a phased effectiveness verification and will be fully launched soon."

3. AI e-commerce has amplified the commercial value of the entire Taobao ecosystem

The involvement of AI technology has optimized user experience, driving an increase in Taobao's user base and purchase frequency, further driving steady growth in merchants' business.

Shu Yang introduced that during Tmall's 618 shopping festival, the number of 88VIP members increased by over 65% year-on-year, and the size of the Z generation consumer group grew by 9.7%. Taobao users' usage days and purchase frequency increased significantly, with the average number of purchase days increasing by 8% year-on-year, the average number of purchases increasing by 13% year-on-year, and the average order value increasing by 17.8% year-on-year.

In addition, data from the third-party agency Analysys also showed that the daily active user count (DAU) of the Taobao APP during the entire Tmall 618 period increased by 23.4% year-on-year. The transaction volume on the Taobao Tian platform increased by 12% year-on-year, outpacing the overall e-commerce market, with the platform accounting for 62% of the market share in comprehensive e-commerce.

Shu Yang believes that the return of platform users drives steady growth in merchants' business, and different types of consumer groups also drive growth in different types of merchants and numerous vertical segments.

With this growth trend, let's make a few guesses about the future of AI e-commerce:

Guess 1: The future e-commerce industry may "ALL IN" AI large models to optimize advertising algorithms, redefining the precision of person-product matching. Large models bring more natural and friendly interaction methods to meet merchant needs; they can also participate in merchants' operations, diagnostic analysis, and target audience selection; while continuously iterating tools to help merchants create advertising content.

Guess 2: The "pay-free linkage" commercialization mechanism and full-site promotion products will leverage more organic traffic to promote large-scale explosions in person-product matches. After all, "pay-free linkage" unifies the logic of traffic fees, enabling merchants of all sizes to break through bottlenecks restricting their business development on Taobao and Tmall, continuously accelerating new product launches, efficiently boosting potential products, and expanding business scope without investing more human and material resources.

Guess 3: For Alimama, "AI e-commerce" is not just AIGC. Previously, AIGA reshaped the advertising intelligent marketing technology system; AIGB penetrated into various domain skill models; AIGC intelligent creation tools are now widely adopted. Alimama's approach may be to create "AIGX," enabling merchants to take the initiative in growth in AI e-commerce in the future.

4. In Conclusion

"Leave the complexity to the system and simplicity to the customer." This is Alimama's original intention. It is also the driving force behind Alimama continuously introducing simple, easy-to-use, and efficient tools in the era of AI e-commerce.

Technological development will reorganize many business elements, but only business models that run parallel with technology can truly traverse cycles. Now, AI technology is assisting merchants in achieving growth. The inaugural Alimama Future Business Awards and 73 winning cases have already set many examples for the industry.

Next, Alimama may accompany merchants in various industries and scenarios to seize the opportunities of the AI e-commerce era.

The Alimama Future Business Awards have specially created the [Alimama "AI Influence"] podcast, featuring audio recordings of 73 excellent future business award-winning cases. To access the干货 content you want to know about brand growth, simply say, "Tmall Genie, play Alimama AI Influence cases," and you can listen to the audio explanations of 73 excellent future business award-winning cases.