Alibaba halts coupons after AI bot struggles with demand surge

Alibaba’s AI chatbot Qwen, digital coupons and AI-powered shopping was put to test during China’s Spring Festival as the e-commerce group tested a new way for customers to shop entirely through conversational prompts.

The experiment, designed to move Qwen beyond question-answering into full transactions, quickly ran into capacity limits after a surge in user demand. Shoppers could use the coupon capabilities, together with a chatbot, to purchase products directly from Alibaba’s retail stores.

The program is a key component of Qwen’s 3 billion yuan ($433 million) investment, which is aimed to enhance Qwen’s uptake during one of the busiest online retail seasons in China – the holiday period and has an overall goal to drive up Qwen’s usage.

Overload disrupts Alibaba’s AI coupon campaign

In less than nine hours since its launch, Qwen‘s servers received over 10 million purchase requests through the chatbot, completely overwhelming the systems of Qwen chatbot. By Saturday, Qwen had stopped fulfilling orders, issuing automated replies to customers stating that due too many people signing up for the campaign, no further credits could be given.

On Qwen’s official Weibo account, it acknowledged the demand on their systems, stating; “The enthusiasm from people wanting to try out AI shopping is above our expectations!”

On the same site, they states, “There are too many participants for ‘ Qwen free order ‘ at this time,” and said their staff would do everything possible to stabilize operations.

In a separate note, Qwen sought to reassure customers that the campaign had not been terminated and was still on-going.

The coupons will still work through 28 February 2024 so that customers will have additional time to redeem them after service has been stabilized.

This comes after Alibaba recently released the updated Qwen mobile app in January 2026. Most users reported a pleasant experience.

Wu Jia, the company’s vice-president for consumer AI, showcased the app’s features as she ordered 40 cups of milk tea via Qwen at the launch event.

Alibaba’s Qwen large language models (LLMs) were used to develop the mobile app. The Chinese tech company is trying to create an easy-to-use interface via its AI agent features.

After linking Qwen to apps like Taobao and Alipay, users can tell it to do tasks such as ordering drinks or paying bills, instead of swiping the screen repeatedly.

Agentic AI strategy mirrors global rivals

Alibaba’s campaign is the first public test of their new AI strategy, dubbed “Agentic AI”, which aims to develop a version of Qwen equal to the role of Google’s Assistant as the main point of access for all of Alibaba’s apps and products.

Users will use Qwen as their only way to navigate, buy and pay across the entire Alibaba app ecosystem.

This strategy follows what many of Alibaba’s global competitors are doing, like Google, who is integrating its own AI product Gemini into its suite of services including Google Maps and Google Search. This trend signals that Alibaba believes that giving consumers conversational commerce will be a new way to reduce friction and maintain engagement across many parts of their overall platform.

The company has not made any comments on the technical performance of their tested AI product, however, the incident demonstrates how AI type consumer behavior is changing but also highlights some of the issues companies are experiencing when scaling their capabilities using AI technology quickly.

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