Shopping Olympics
The November 11 shopping festival has become an important window into China’s progress
Like numerous others already filling their online shopping carts in the lead-up to the November 11 shopping festival, Wang Yating, an interpreter in west China’s Chongqing, pulled an all-nighter to purchase bargains in flash sales. As the first minute of November 11 struck, she quickly clicked her mouse and saw the number of orders to be delivered rise to 32.
Wang spent about 15,000 yuan ($2,155) on Tmall.com, the business-to-consumer marketplace owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, mainly on house decor. “Still, I forgot to add about 1,000 yuan ($144) worth of bargains to my shopping cart. The prices fell and I kind of regret it now,” she told Beijing Review.
Similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States, November 11, popularly known as Singles’ Day in China, has become the largest online shopping day in China. This year, the annual bonanza brought a gross merchandise value (GMV) of 213.5 billion yuan ($30.6 billion) to Tmall.com and Taobao.com, Alibaba’s consumer-toconsumer platform. Other online sellers such as Netease Kaola and Jd.com also saw their sales volume reach record highs. Apart from searching for clothing and food bargains, consumers also turned to discounted bigticket products such as smartphones and televisions.
“The November 11 event has turned into a business Olympics,” said Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, who initiated the event in 2009. “It has become the largest festival for sellers and buyers at home and abroad.”
New records
Evolving from a sales promotion campaign of Tmall.com a decade ago, the November 11 shopping festival has become a great event for both Chinese consumers and global sellers, reflecting the development of e-commerce, logistics and other relevant sectors in the country, along with people’s upgraded consumption habits in the past decade.
This year, the shopping festival’s Chinese GMV ballooned to over 4,000 times its level in 2009. Despite concerns over China’s economic growth slowdown and uncertainties generated by the trade tensions with the United States, Chinese consumers still completed over $10 billion worth of purchases in the first two minutes and five seconds of November 11. After only 15 hours, 49 minutes and 39 seconds, Tmall.com’s sales volume exceeded the full-day total in 2017.
Now, with a few clicks of the mouse or a smartphone, Chinese consumers can