During this year's Double Eleven shopping festival, Token (word token) entered multiple e-commerce platforms for the first time as an independent product category. Computing power consumption that was once hidden in the back end of large-model services began to be offered to ordinary consumers as a purchasable and comparable product. This means that token consumption is gradually extending from the API-call model dominated by enterprises and developers to the mass market.

A token is essentially the computing resource consumed when users use AI services; paying for tokens is in effect buying the computing power service behind them. In the past, related fees were mainly settled in the background by large-model vendors based on usage volume. Ordinary users found it difficult to intuitively understand unit prices and lacked channels for side-by-side price comparison. Now that tokens are placed on e-commerce shelves, the barrier for users to buy AI computing power services has been lowered.

Take Su Guoqing, a resident of Xining, Qinghai, as an example. He is a short-video enthusiast and took advantage of a major e-commerce promotion to buy a large number of tokens for video production. He said that simple video production consumes fewer tokens, while complex scene construction and action storyboards require more tokens.

However, the commercialization of tokens is still in its early stages. Industry insiders point out that to truly become a mass consumer product, related services still need to improve metering and accounting, pricing mechanisms, security controls, and compliance governance. Consumers also expect platforms to clarify how unused balances are handled and how consumer disputes are resolved, and to improve after-sales protection. As AI applications become more widespread, tokens are expected to become a new digital consumer category, but their large-scale development will still depend on the maturity of price transparency, service standardization, and consumer protection systems.