The 11/11 Sale
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China Double 11 Stats, News & Insights
What is the hottest word among Chinese netizens these days? It's the “Bachelor’s Day Promotion” or Singles Day Promotion. Almost every netizen has got the invitation for this ceremony whether or not you are a bachelor. About Singles Day Promotion in China November 11th has become a special festival during recent years. With four characters of “1”, this date was named as Bachelor’s Day. On this day, young people will hold bachelor parties to create couples or simply have fun. Some choose to end their bachelor life by showing love or proposing for marriage. In 2009, Alibaba held the first Double Eleven Shopping Festival on Taobao.com, storming the online shopping for the very first time. Three years later, with coming 2012's Bachelor’s Day, more than 10,000 businesses, cooperating with e-commerce sites, are poised to rock the shopping festival again. Participants took actions to meet this festival. Some clothes manufactures began to hoard products for this winter from August. And they made full preparation on supplying chains and staff arrangements. China Express Association organized “Double Eleven” meetings to discuss measurements. Major logistics companies like EMS, Shentong, Yuantong, Home Delivery... are going to recruit thousands of new staffs to meet the need of peak online shopping periods. Big Promotions on Major Online Retail Websites Big promotions in the name of celebrating Nov 11 Bachelor's Day usually start at the very beginning of November with huge discounts and give aways lined up. Some shopping platforms start early; 360buy started its one-month “Desert Storm” Promotions in Oct 10, offering coupons which value 50 million Yuan in total. Suning started promotions called “Zero Purchasing Within 300-hundred Yuan”. After spending 300 hundred yuan on suning.com, consumers could get coupons with the same value. Coupons could also be used in more than 1700 offline Suning stores. Gome Online Mall continuingly made efforts to supply goods at reduced prices, which scaled 1 billion Yuan in total, lowering the online prices for approximately 40%. Tmall advanced rushing purchases of coupons. Successive rounds of promotions are started at 10:00, 14:00, 20:00 every day until Bachelor’s Day. Besides Tmall, Alibaba supported Taobao to take part in this shopping festival. More than 10,000 businesses are involved, which is 5 times of that compared to last year. Moreover, Dangdang has fired its “Fire Promotions” from Nov 9, which will also last until Nov 11. In the meantime, it will celebrate its third anniversary. More than price wars You may wonder what the driving force of these crazy promotions is. Bachelor’s Day Promotion may be the most important timing to achieve annual revenue goal. Take Suning as an example. According to its latest quarterly financial report, it achieved sales of 9.5 billion yuan in the last 3 quarters. Though representing increase, there is a huge gap between the present performances with its sales goal of 20 billion Yuan. Year-end promotions are quite significant for Suning. Basically, e-commerce cannot break away from its essence of retailing. Besides prices, they also compete on product varieties, users’ experience and resources. That is to say, this war is not only a challenge for promotion ability, but also a test of storage, logistics and capitals. Both of Gome and Suning joined their online and offline channels, leading the whole industry to develop in the department store-oriented way. Dangdang entered Tmall as a flagship stores of books and commodities. Previously, No.1 Store, New Egg and Yintai had stepped into Tmall. Suning officially acquired the Red Child as well as drew in Vancl and LAFASO, from which we can see its ambition to capture commodities categories. If your business offers online purchase to Chinese consumers, November's Bachelor's Day should definitely be part of your annual sales strategy. Of course, it does not necessarily mean you should join the competition. But, if you do, timing and preparation are crucial to achieve successful online sales.
Alibaba's Singles' Day: What We Know About The World's Biggest Shopping Event
I am running up to Shenzhen this week to help out with Singles' Day, which has become not just the largest e-commerce shopping day in China but the largest in the world. Alibaba launched this annual November 11 online sale in 2009 with just 27 participating merchants. Since then, they’ve turned it into a series of activities that captures the national conversation in China, sets the pace for marketing and advertising, dominates the entire logistics chain, and turns China’s retail ecosystem upside down. When Western merchants think of online mega-sales, they might think of Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But retailers also ought to be watching 11.11 closely, not only because of China’s growing importance as a consumer market, but also because of the retailing innovations in O2O, cross-border e-commerce, digital marketing and other areas that are part of the 11.11 sale. Here’s what you need to know: Not just large, the largest. In 2016, Alibaba passed $14 billion in revenue on Singles' Day, more than double the $5.8 billion in sales of the combined U.S. e-commerce holidays of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. How is this possible? Alibaba’s China retail marketplaces boast some 440 million active users shopping the virtual stores of millions of businesses. No other platform comes close in terms of scale. My prediction: Singles' Day 2016 will see an increase of 50%, taking total sales above $21 billion. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has built a machine that will hum along at almost $1 billion an hour. Shopping is not just a transaction in China, it is an event. Even a way of life. Singles' Day is such a spectacle that it is a destination in its own right. Alibaba has hired Hollywood producer David Hill, best known for producing the Oscars and the Super Bowl, to produce a four-hour nationally televised gala for the evening of November 10 leading to a midnight kick-off (yes, I will be there). Headlining the gala is Katy Perry, and there will also be bands from Korea and Taiwan, German soccer star Thomas Muller (Bayern Munich) and other celebrities from around the world. The audience in China last year when Daniel Craig headlined was over 100 million. My prediction: Gala viewership this year crowds 200 million, at least 10 million of whom will be from outside of mainland China. The best tool for accessing the China market. Don’t lose sight of the original goal for Singles' Day. China is the fastest-growing consumer market in the world and e-commerce is the fastest-growing channel in that market. So 11.11 is a chance to speak to these China consumers , whether you are introducing a new product or refreshing your brand. There are plenty of sales and bargains, but the day is much more than a celebration of mark-downs. You are joining the national conversation. You need to have something to say. Some brands will launch products specifically for Singles' Day. Others will offer live-streamed contests and reality TV shows. It is an emerging channel for global interaction. The Singles’ Day sale is not just a way to connect consumers and brands, it is a way to connect China and the world. Alibaba’s Tmall B2C marketplace has been building connectivity in Hong Kong and Taiwan for several years. (Note the Singles' Day ads on the Hong Kong subway system.) Already, some 10% of the purchases on Singles' Day are from overseas brands. It is not a day, it is a month. Sure, 11.11 is the day for the sale, but promotional activity starts 30 days out with a major October series of announcements and promotional activities, much like Christmas shopping starts the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S. Brands need a bit of runway for messaging, to develop word-of-mouth, and to gauge the market. Singles' Day is designed to help the merchants as much as the consumer and a 30-day event allows everyone to get the most out of it. It is the future of digital innovation: Alibaba is featuring an augmented reality game to allow people to chase black cats (the Tmall mascot) like Pokémon GO. The company has also unveiled for the sale a virtual reality shopping experience that allows consumers to connect their smartphones with a VR headset and make purchases as if they were in a physical store in New York City. And there are mobile apps that enable shoppers to digitally see how they look in clothes and cosmetics. My prediction: Bad news for laptops. Some 60-70% or sales will come from mobile. So fingers crossed for Singles' Day. Good luck to all consumers and merchants. And if you are watching Katy Perry at the Gala Nov 10 and you see another Left Shark stumbling a bit on stage -- that just might be me. Frank Lavin is the CEO of Export Now, the leading operator of China e-commerce stores for international brands. He previously worked on China issues in government, finance, and communications.
Singles Day: Alibaba breaks record sales total
E-commerce giant Alibaba has beaten its sales record for its annual Singles Day event. The company said sales this year had reached 121bn yuan ($18bn; ?14bn), a rise of 32% on last year's sales which were worth $14.3bn. But some have questioned the accuracy of the numbers, amid claims of inflated sales data at Chinese online retailers. Merchants passing off counterfeit goods as genuine is also a problem in the industry. Alibaba reported 82% of purchases had been made on mobile phones during Singles Day. Technology shift The company has also been experimenting with new technology including augmented reality and virtual reality to give shoppers other ways of buying items. How Alibaba wants to change shopping And the event had a blistering start with sales hitting $5bn (?4bn) in the first hour, Alibaba said, though that total included pre-orders made by customers who could "lock in" prices. It took 90 minutes to hit that milestone in 2015. Singles Day is held every year on 11 November. The day is also referred to as Double Eleven because of its date. Originally claimed as a celebration for China's young singletons, Alibaba turned it into a shopping bonanza in 2009. While Alibaba is undeniably the driving force behind the event, other retailers have also started to piggyback off the idea, including extending the concept to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Alibaba's rival JD.com, which focuses more on electronics, reported receiving more orders in the first nine hours of trading on Friday than it had done during the whole of Singles Day 2014. It said sales passed last year's Singles Day total in the early afternoon, but gave no figures. Patty Cao, an analyst at Aberdeen Asset Management, said that the pace of Alibaba sales "show that Singles Day might be the ultimate symbol of how the Chinese economy is changing". She said: "Alibaba is a bit of a bellwether for the country's consumer... China is trying shift the economy away from a reliance on investment and manufacturing towards one driven by consumer spending and services. "It's not been plain sailing. Growth has taken a significant hit. So events like Singles Day are important indicators to feel the pulse of China's economy." Yashan Zhao, BBC Chinese - 'Unstoppable hands' Obsessive shoppers have been lamenting for years that they should cut off their "unstoppable hands" because they end up buying far more than they actually need. But this year, they were joining in on the shopping frenzy again. One Taobao user posted an image of Alibaba founder Jack Ma as a vampire to show his love and hate for the online bonanza. Lili Lee took advantage of the festival two years ago but ended up being scammed for 13,000 yuan ($1,908; ?1,519)- five times her monthly salary. But this year she is back online and has already spent about 7,000 yuan. As has now become tradition, Singles Day was kicked off with a televised gala event which this year included a performances by One Republic and appearances by basketball legend Kobe Bryant, English football legend David Beckham and singer-turned designer Victoria Beckham. But pop star Katy Perry, who had been scheduled to perform, withdrew citing a family emergency. Analysts had predicted this year's event could see Alibaba rack up sales of $20bn despite a slowdown in China's economy, partly due to the event having a broader audience. "We're seeing an even bigger shift from offline shopping to online shopping," Kitty Fok, managing director of IDC China told the BBC. "And there is also more of a focus on rural areas. People in the villages who could not do online shopping now have mobile phones and so can do that."
Knowledge Graph
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1 Singles Day is held every year on 11 November. The day is also referred to as Double Eleven because of its date.
2 Singles Day has grown tremendously since Alibaba began promoting it as a shopping day in 2009, and now includes many retailers such as rivals JD.com that stage sales promotions.
3 Many shoppers are well aware the economy is slowing. It is common for people to wait to spend on Singles Day to save money.