A screen shows the value of goods being transacted during Alibaba Group’s Singles’ Day global shopping festival at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, November 12, 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song
After 24 hours of frenzied shopping, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said its sales for its annual Singles’ Day shopping reached 268.4 billion yuan ($38.3 billion) and hit another record high.
Singles’ Day shopping is also known as “Double Eleven”. Akin to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States, as the largest e-commerce retailer in China, Alibaba began its annual sales promotion on November 11 in 2009, with merchants offering attractive discounts. But Singles’ Day is much larger. The Black Friday gained less than $25 billion in sales last year and less than $8 billion on Cyber Monday. Alibaba Group only spent 68 seconds to sell $1 billion of goods on their Tmall and Taobao and sold the first $10 billion in half-hour.
The event has been replicated at home and abroad, with promotions from rivals in China such as JD.com Inc and Pinduoduo Inc as well as South Korea’s 11th Street and Singapore’s Qoo10. JD.com Inc, the second-largest e-commerce giant, sold a total of 204.4 billion yuan($29.2 billion) of goods on Singles’ Day.
According to the data from Alibaba Group, in the first year of Double Eleven in 2009, China’s online shopping market was not yet mature. Chinese people were not familiar with online shopping, and some remote families even did not have access to the internet. Most consumers lived in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, so the sales were only 50 million yuan ($7.1 million).
However, an increasing number of people began to get access to the internet and enjoyed the convenience of online shopping with the rapid development of the internet in China. By this year, the sales increased by more than 500 times compared with 2009 and hit 268.4 billion yuan ($38.3 billion).
According to a report released by China’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, 854 million people were actively using the internet in China by June 2019, and China’s internet penetration rate was 61.2 percent. Among the significant number of internet users, online shoppers accounted for 74.8 percent and reached 622 million.
“The younger generation is buying more, and the customer from rural areas, the customers from lower-tier cities, they are buying imported products,” Tmall General Manager Alvin Liu told reporters.
Alibaba’s massive 11.11 countdown party included American star Taylor Swift on a moving stage with LED lights that required 300 people to operate. (Credit to Alibaba)
To attract more people to participate, especially younger generations, Alibaba hosted a “Countdown Gala” featuring a performance by pop singers, including Taylor Swift. This year, Alibaba also focused on live-streaming through its platform. Over 200,000 brands from all over the world took part in the promotion of Singles’ Day, and some retailers hired social media influencers or celebrities to promote their products before the shopping festival.
“Nearly all our brands have opted for live streaming promotions some times this year,” says Josh Gardner, who helps overseas companies sell products on Tmall as CEO of Kung Fu Data.