Alibaba’s Qianwen app kicked off a high-stakes Lunar New Year promotion on Feb. 6, promising what it calls a “30-billion-yuan big free-order” campaign aimed at driving rapid adoption of AI-enabled commerce. In the first wave running through Feb. 12, every user who upgrades to the latest app receives a 25-yuan no-threshold “Qianwen free-order card”; invitations of new users earn additional 25-yuan cards, with an upper limit of 21 cards per person (a theoretical maximum of 525 yuan). The campaign covers more than 300,000 offline outlets, including national chains such as Luckin, Mixue Bingcheng and Nayuki, and the vouchers can be used across food delivery and flash-commerce scenarios linked into the app’s ecosystem.
The giveaway is not simply a discount stunt. Qianwen has been integrated with Taobao Flash Buy, Fliggy and Amap to enable one-sentence ordering and other AI-assisted purchase flows. Alibaba is calibrating the promotion as both a user-acquisition vehicle and a real-world demonstration of voice- and prompt-driven shopping powered by its AI stack. The company has paired coupon giveaways with product integrations and a planned second wave from Feb. 13 that will distribute cash red envelopes of up to 2,888 yuan, further escalating incentives for sign-ups and engagement.
Traffic surged immediately after launch and the app experienced momentary lag, prompting the operator to say it was allocating extra infrastructure resources to stabilise performance. The rapid demand underscores the friction-reducing power of cheap, time-limited incentives during a holiday season when consumers are primed to spend. Qianwen’s promotional reach is amplified by cross-promotion inside Alibaba’s broader ecosystem; reports from the launch period also noted senior attention at the company’s headquarters, signalling the project’s internal strategic priority.
For consumers the offer is straightforward: easy, low-friction discounts for everyday purchases during the New Year window. For Alibaba the attraction is longer term. The campaign converts holiday footfall into data, usage patterns and repeated interactions with AI-driven ordering systems — the kind of habit-forming behaviour that can justify future product and ad monetisation. It also gives Alibaba a testing ground to smooth voice prompts and transactional AI at scale, converting proof-of-concept into normalised consumer behaviour.
But the move raises questions about sustainability and market impact. A three-billion-yuan headline figure is eye-catching, but heavy subsidies can compress merchant margins, prompt competitive responses from rivals, and attract regulatory scrutiny if promotions are judged to distort market competition. Operational strains — from server capacity to voucher fraud and merchant settlement mechanics — also become more visible under such volume-driven campaigns.
Strategically, Qianwen’s giveaway will accelerate the mainstreaming of conversational commerce in China, where holidays are uniquely effective moments to reset consumer habits. If the campaign succeeds in habituating users to “one sentence” ordering and cross-platform checkout inside Alibaba’s stack, the long-term prize is not the immediate voucher spend but a stickier, AI-mediated payments and retail channel that rivals will find hard to dislodge. Policymakers and competitors will watch closely to see whether heavy discounting simply swaps market share or actually builds durable new user behaviour around AI-driven shopping.