Alibaba plans five-day ‘farmer’s festival’ to drive e-commerce in Chinese hinterlands over Lunar New Year
With aid of Rural Taobao and Cainiao Logistics, nation’s online shopping juggernaut aims to tap broader Chinese market with series of events for this Spring Festival to build on success of Singles Day
Alibaba Group, which pioneered the Singles Day retail event in China that falls on November 11, is poised to make an all-out assault on the mainland’s largely untapped rural e-commerce market, with the launch of a five-day Lunar New Year online shopping festival from Sunday.
The world’s largest e-commerce services provider has mobilised affiliate Cainiao Logistics to bolster its “last-mile” delivery network in more than 270 counties and about 13,000 villages to support the new festival, an Alibaba spokeswoman said.
Cainiao’s big-data analysis and logistics infrastructure, including warehouses in five provinces, are expected to enhance delivery services during the festival.
“Based on Cainiao’s big-data analysis, merchants on Alibaba platforms can deliver products that are expected to sell well to Cainiao’s county-level operations centres in advance,” the Alibaba spokeswoman said.
We aim to enable rural customers to access an extensive range of New Year goods from home and abroad, while making agriculture products from rural China more available among urban customers
Those products are expected to arrive at the door of consumers in as little as 24 hours after the online orders are placed.”