Alibaba’s Qwen Chatbot Halts Coupons Amid Customer Overload

The issue with the Chinese tech giant’s Qwen chatbot has marred the company’s campaign to promote the tool’s abilities beyond answering questions, Reuters reported Monday (Feb. 9).

According to the report, the artificial intelligence chatbot last week began offering coupons to customers allowing for in-app purchases from Alibaba-owned retailers using chatbot prompts alone. The program ‍is ⁠the first stage in a 3-billion-yuan ($433 million) initiative to attract more users to the chatbot during China’s yearly Spring Festival holiday.

Since last month, Reuters noted, Alibaba has tried to turn Qwen into a ​hub that lets users access the company’s other apps through the chatbot and make payments, similar to the way Google has integrated its Gemini chatbot ​into its apps.

However, the report said, this strategy has been held up by technical troubles since the coupon giveaway began. Alibaba said 10 million orders were placed within the first nine hours of ‌the campaign. A surge of order attempts this weekend led the chatbot to announce that it was overloaded.

Reuters says its checks showed that repeated purchase prompt Monday showed different versions of a refusal, down to oversubscription. Qwen has told customers that they’ll still have time to redeem their coupons, which are valid until Feb. 28.

Consumers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to shop, research from PYMNTS Intelligence has found.

According to a report titled “Consumers Stop Sampling AI and Start Relying on It,” this shift applies to one third of “mainstream” AI users.

It’s a trend that extends into shopping and purchasing, with nearly half of so-called “power users” saying they have replaced their old approaches with AI-driven alternatives, an increase from the 39% who said the same thing a month earlier. The same pattern could be seen among mainstream users, from 22% to 32%.

“What this reveals is that growth among adopters is driven less by new users coming on board and more by a deeper integration of AI into the everyday workflows of people already using it,” the report said. “Power users aren’t just using AI more frequently; they’re making it the default. Light users, by contrast, continue to treat conversational AI as an occasional or supplementary tool rather than as a primary channel.”