Executives announced at the recent Top Talk event that Alibaba Group’s B2C marketplace Tmall is committing “unprecedented strategic resources” to support brands in 2025.
The platform’s focus on brand growth delivered results in 2024—more than 4,100 brands generated over RMB100 million in annual sales each, while total sales for these brands saw an 18% year-on-year increase, reflecting solid growth despite a high base.
“Successful brands not only lead in their GMV performance, but they also demonstrate originality and creativity that drive consumer demand by crafting exceptional products,” explained Liu Bo, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Tmall. “These brands attract new users, foster loyal consumers, and focus on sustainable long-term development.”
Boosting Brand Success with Enhanced Resources
Tmall announced at the 2025 Top Talk event that its commission rebate program will be expanded to all product categories, following successful results in the pilot program for select categories. 90% of brands in the pilot program achieved double-digit growth and received cash rebates as of March end. For example, Japanese retail giant MUJI saw 40% year-on-year sales growth in February and March combined. MUJI was rewarded with operating cost savings of over RMB3 million, which was available for reinvestment into its business.
The platform will also enhance support for product launches, including new marketing tools and an extension of the product incubation cycle from 30 days to 90 days. The “Tmall Super Launch” campaign has been particularly successful, enabling 34,000 new products to achieve sales exceeding RMB10 million each. This feature alone generated a total of RMB100 billion in sales in 2024.
Doubling Down on User Growth
Taobao and Tmall continue to see strong overall user growth. The platform has one billion annual active consumers and saw significant year-on-year growth of first-time buyers in the first quarter of 2025.
At Top Talk, Liu highlighted the growth potential for brands through increased penetration of the massive consumer base on the platform. Top performing brands on Tmall have gained tens of millions of annual active consumers, with brand loyalty members contributing over 50% of total sales.
To boost repeat purchases, Tmall is increasing investment in brand-specific and platform-wide loyalty programs. Brands will be able to increase member engagement through new membership access points across Taobao search results, recommendations, and shopping carts.
AI-Powered Efficiency Boost
Significant upgrades were introduced to the merchant AI toolsets at the 2025 Top Talk. These enhancements include new image-to-video generation capabilities within the AI-generated Content (AIGC) tool and an advanced marketing bidding model that, on average, boosts campaign ROI by 12% through automated bidding strategies. Additionally, AI customer service chatbots have continued to evolve, offering increasingly sophisticated support.
These advanced AI technologies have been integrated across the e-commerce process – product recommendations, bidding optimization, content creation, and performance analytics – to help maximize merchant operational efficiency.
