Liu Sixuan, intern journalist at the Economic Observer

On September 2nd, Zhipu opened its flagship store on Tmall, selling only one type of product: model tokens. At the Tmall flagship store, Zhipu has launched four GLM Coding Plans (programming packages) with prices consistent with those on its official open platform, Zhipu BigModel.

On September 3rd, Tmall launched the "AI Space Station" section, bringing the model subscription services of Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax, and DeepSeek into one page. The products on sale include Token packages and Coding Plans that are subscribed on a periodic basis; Among them, Alibaba Cloud and Zhipu are the official flagship stores of the brand, while the other models are temporarily third-party agent stores. Kimi、MiniMax、 Several major model manufacturers, including Step Leap Star, are also in talks with Tmall and will open an official flagship store on Tmall in the future to sell Token subscription package products.

At almost the same time, the "AI Software Recharge Hall" section of JD.com was launched, displaying intelligent spectra Seedance、DeepSeek、 The four models of Doubao, among which only Zhipu is the official flagship store, are priced the same as BigModel; And set up a "Popular AI Applications" section, where users can purchase membership benefits such as WPS, Baidu Wenku, Jianying, NetEase Youdao, etc.

As of press time, Zhipu's Tmall flagship store has no publicly available sales data, while JD's self operated flagship store has sold a total of 84 products.

Before joining the e-commerce channel, individual users mainly purchased model call quotas from the following five entrances:

One is the manufacturer's own open platform. After registering an account and completing authentication, you can subscribe to different levels of Coding Plans or directly recharge any amount to call the API.

The second is cloud vendors, such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, which have opened model supermarkets. In addition to their own models, users can also purchase open source models from other vendors.

The third is third-party aggregation platforms, such as silicon-based flow. These platforms do not produce models and are not affiliated with any model manufacturer. They integrate multiple open-source models into the same interface, allowing users to switch between calling different models using a single API.

The fourth is telecom operators. Around May, China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom successively launched Token packages for individual and enterprise users, supporting direct ordering through apps or mobile phone bills. Some provinces bundled them with broadband and cloud computers for sale. Taking China Unicom Beijing Branch as an example, searching for "Token" in the app will redirect you to the AI Equity Zone. The "45 Million Tokens" package is priced at 49 yuan and can be used to access models such as DeepSeek-V4-Flash, GLM-5.2, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, etc.

The fifth is a small number of unauthorized channels. Previously, e-commerce and social media platforms circulated low-priced tokens and "AI intermediary" card codes, mostly from bulk registered account splitting and gift quotas, shared accounts, and third-party intermediaries, which posed certain security risks.

A developer continues to purchase token quotas from official open platforms such as Zhipu and DeepSeek, and he is not currently considering using e-commerce platforms for recharging. On the open platform, he only needs to check the package he wants to buy or enter the amount to be charged, scan the code and pay to complete the transaction; But on e-commerce platforms, after payment, one needs to collect a card password, manually enter it into the account, or provide their account information to customer service for recharging, which is a cumbersome process. In the absence of price advantages or free benefits, he prefers to choose the official website channel.

(Author Liu Sixuan)