At 20:00 on October 12, 2026, the first round of spot sales will be held on JD.com’s Double 11. No deposit is required for pre-sale, and orders for spot products can be placed directly.
Three days later, at 20:00 on October 15, Taobao and Tmall Double 11 launched. The pre-sale is only available for five days:
Pay the final payment on October 20th, and the spot goods will go on sale at the same time. Single items will be discounted immediately, so there is no need to put together an order.
On the same day, Douyin’s Double 11 event started.
The official activity period is from October 15th to November 11th, and the gameplay is as follows:Official instant discount, one item off.
Three platforms, three arrangements, the same direction:Lowering the threshold for transaction, no need to wait, no need to gather, no need to calculate.
The model that operates by compressing one month’s demand into a window has been running for eighteen years. Do you still believe in the platform itself?
1. “Waiting” used to be the core asset of Double 11
The first Double 11 in 2009, there was only one way to play:At 0:00 on November 11th, limited-time low prices, concentrated transactions.Pre-sales, deposit balances, and cross-store discounts were all added year by year.
This mechanism can last for eighteen years. The bottom layer is a transaction: consumers pay and wait in exchange for price discounts; what the platform earns is the scale effect of concentrating scattered demand at one point in time.
The premise for the transaction to be established is that it can be exchanged for a large enough discount.In an era when e-commerce penetration is low and prices are opaque, this premise is very stable.
In 2026, while the platform will continue to hold major promotions, it will lower the participation threshold again and again. Lowering the threshold does not mean that the big promotion has expired. This may be just to extend the life of the big promotion. But one question was brought to the forefront:When big sales no longer require consumers to wait and calculate, what is the difference between them and daily purchases?The answer lies not only in the text of the rules, but also in another line of business.
2. There are two purchasing paths for the same inventory.
In the summer of 2025, instant retail will fight a subsidy war:Taobao’s flash sale announced a 50 billion subsidy plan (12-month period), JD.com’s takeaway investment exceeded 10 billion, and Meituan announced an investment of 100 billion in three years.The magnitude itself already illustrates the platform’s betting strength. On July 18, 2025, the State Administration for Market Regulation interviewed three platforms and required them to standardize promotional behaviors and participate in competition rationally. By the fourth quarter of 2025, subsidies will shift from flood irrigation to targeted delivery.
Subsidies ebb, and what remains is more important than subsidies:Branded goods began to enter two purchase paths at the same time.
In October 2025, Tmall President Jia Luo gave an example in an interview: Suppose you see a 99 yuan Uniqlo T-shirt in the Tmall flagship store. You can choose it yourself and have it delivered by ordinary e-commerce, or delivered immediately by a nearby store. On the same product page, two fulfillment methods are side by side.
Behind this picture is the expansion of the supply side. On Double 11 in 2025, Taobao’s flash sales will be connected to 37,000 brand merchants and 400,000 stores; according to the review of the overseas edition of the People’s Daily on November 21, 2025, Meituan’s flash sales of more than 800 brands doubled on the first day of Double 11.
The launch of new iPhone products in September 2026 will demonstrate the relationship between the two paths more completely: pre-sale on September 12, official release on September 18. On the day of release, Taobao flash sales will be delivered from authorized stores in the fastest 18 minutes, and JD.com will simultaneously undertake instant delivery of new products at authorized stores and front-end warehouses. During the pre-sale period, the inventory is waiting to be locked, and the delivery after the sale is within minutes. This is the fastest timeliness for a specific new product event scenario. It is not a general performance level, but it shows that the spot inventory of the brand authorization system can be scheduled in 30 minutes.
It should be noted that the juxtaposition of the two paths does not mean that inventory and accounting have been unified:Ordinary e-commerce may deliver goods from a central warehouse, while instant retail may fulfill contracts from nearby stores. The supplier, settlement and profit attribution need to be accounted for separately.This is a business requirement that every brand must face.
3. For planning needs, will you still wait until Double 11 by default?
For the same pair of headphones, if consumers plan to replace them in advance and are willing to wait for a big sale to compare prices; if the headphones break the night before a business trip, they will place an order immediately and have them delivered within 30 minutes. The product has not changed, the brand has not changed, the purchase task is different, and the transaction time is different.
This example demonstrates the difference in purchasing tasks, but not the deeper changes. In the past, when brands made Double 11 budgets, there was a default assumption that was rarely stated:Planned needs that are suitable for discounts will be released uniformly until the big promotion.This hypothesis now needs to be retested. Instant retail and daily e-commerce have always existed. The real change is that the instant supply of genuine brand goods is spreading on a large scale, and consumers can buy brand goods at the moment when demand occurs.
What has been observed is a change in channel conditions: there are more purchasing options. What has not yet been proven is behavioral transfer:How many of the planned orders originally waiting for Double 11 have been transferred?There is no public answer to the latter, and the answer depends on the brand’s own transaction research.
There is another side to the story. Instant retail has not left the big promotions, it is participating in the big promotions: QuestMobile’s 2025 Double 11 research report observed the integration of traditional e-commerce and instant retail, and the platform is turning instant fulfillment into a new scenario of big promotions. In September 2026, Meituan announced a three-year investment of 30 billion in the instant retail ecosystem. The goal of 100,000 flash warehouses is expected to be completed ahead of schedule. Zhenjiu, Mercury Home Textiles, and Jiaoxia have already achieved growth in flash warehouses. While the platform is changing the old conditions for centralized transactions, it is also using instant fulfillment to expand the coverage of major promotions. Both directions are established at the same time.
How to choose a platform is up to the platform. The questions left to brands are very specific:Both big sales and instant retail are going up. What is going up?
4. Two increases cannot be added to one good news.
Imagine a brand’s report card for Double 11 in 2026:Dazhi transactions increased by 20%, real-time channels increased by 80%, and there were two good news on the report.
Let’s pour some cold water on it first: these two pieces of good news may contain the same order. During Tmall’s Double 11 in 2025, branded products that are connected to Taobao’s flash sales can participate in the Double 11 discounts. Some products can be used with 88VIP consumption coupons, and the contracts will be fulfilled immediately by nearby stores. This order counts as both a Double 11 transaction and an instant retail transaction. Double 11 is the only node in the whole year where promotional subsidies, event discounts, and instant fulfillment are all on the same order. The marketing department looks at event ROI, the channel department looks at channel growth, and the supply chain looks at fulfillment costs. Each has its own account.Throughout the year, there is no time more easily than Double 11 to take growth into consideration.
To see growth clearly, you must first place each order in the right place.The location is determined by two dimensions: what promotions the order participates in (big promotions, daily prices, channel subsidies), and how the order is fulfilled (shipping from central warehouse, instant delivery from stores). Only when the two dimensions intersect can the order have its unique ownership.
After placing it in the right position, we can talk about three numbers:
How much the total brand transaction has increased, this is the result;
How much is transferred between channels varies with SKU in the same period;
How much profit is left from the real increase is the number that determines how much investment will be made in 2027.
An order may have changed channels and been completed in advance;Consumers would have bought competing products, but they chose this brand because they could get it within 30 minutes. This is an increase in sales for the brand, but not an increase in demand for the entire category.
The hardest part is the increment.Transaction details can tell brands what users bought, when they bought it, and which channel they used, but they cannot answer the most critical questions:If there was no immediate delivery option, would he still buy it?This counterfactual cannot be calculated based only on SKU, purchase time and crowd tags.
What the data at hand can do is to calculate the accounts in detail: pick out the key SKUs that are sold during major sales and instant delivery, break down the orders in the complete promotion cycle according to the actual promotional rights and fulfillment methods, look at the transaction price, who will bear the subsidy, refunds and fulfillment expenses item by item, and finally return to the overall gross profit contribution of the brand. First count each order in the correct position, and then determine whether there is any transfer between channels. This level of comparison can reveal signs of transfer and profit differences, but cannot prove net increase.
When it comes to large investment decisions, make comparisons if conditions permit: select comparable cities or stores, and compare the impact of different real-time channel investment intensity on the overall sales of the brand under the premise of clear differences in price, delivery, and supply. If the conditions cannot be controlled, the conclusion will remain uncertain. Using comparative estimates to estimate new sales is a mature practice in marketing measurement, and there is no need to invent new tools.
The performance account only counts the portion actually borne by you: delivery fees, platform subsidies, merchant share ratios, store accounts, and promotional commissions. The structure of each platform is different. For an order transferred from a traditional e-commerce company, the purchase price, return rate, and promotional fees have all changed, and the gross profit contribution may rise or fall.Only when the growth of real-time channels is put back into the overall sales volume and gross profit contribution of the brand can we know how much new business it has created.
Pricing issues are also before our eyes: for the same item, the sale price and the 30-minute price are listed side by side in front of users. How much of the price difference is reasonable? The price guarantee does not cross channels. The answer will be found during this Double 11. If you can’t answer, the two paths will undermine each other.
5. The budget for 2027 will go through these three accounts first.
Double 11 will not disappear, it is still one of the largest transaction nodes of the year. What has changed is the structure of the order:A Double 11 transaction may include platform subsidies, event discounts and minute-level fulfillment. It is no longer self-evident which channel it belongs to and which investment it is attributed to.
How to sign the 2027 big promotion budget depends on a more complete account:How much of the growth is new business, how much is channel relocation, whether profits rise or fall after the relocation, plus the contribution of major promotions to gross profit, new repurchase and traffic costs.Brands that cannot reconcile these three accounts will regard channel relocation as growth, and then add an additional year’s budget to this illusion.
