China’s 618 online shopping festival kicks off

China’s largest mid-year shopping festival, known as 618, kicked off on Monday, with pre-sale volumes on Alibaba’s Tmall e-commerce site skyrocketing 515 percent year-on-year within an hour.

The 618 promotion, named for the date of the first event, June 18, is more important for small e-commerce businesses this year as it is the first large-scale shopping festival since the outbreak of COVID-19.

More than 100,000 brands are signed up for the event on Tmall, double last year’s number, with the stores set up by governments of nine countries including Russia, Singapore and Thailand joining in the online retailing festival for the first time, the company said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Monday.

China in late April opened two more land border ports between Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Vietnam to hasten the import of fresh products like fruits from Thailand. The new ports can handle thousands of trucks a day, and a new cold-chain freight train started operating on May 21 from Tongdeng in Vietnam to Pingxiang in Guangxi as Thailand is expecting big sales of fresh fruits like durian and mango during the shopping event.

The shopping festival will last till June 20.

During the event, Tmall will cooperate with local governments and brands to issue a large scale discount coupons and subsidies worth over 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), it said.

These measures to promote consumption are expected to spur consumer enthusiasm which has been depressed while people were under lockdown and the macro-economy faced downward pressure before the virus came under control in China.

On Tmall, pre-sales of consumer electronics and home appliances exceeded 100 million yuan within just seven minutes on Monday, while cosmetics pre-sales surpassed 500 million yuan in the same time.