Clash of the retail titans: Here’s why shopping on China’s Singles’ Day and US Black Friday differ so much

China’s voracious appetite for online shopping is perhaps best shown by the billions of dollars spent online in minutes on Singles’ Day. But the Black Friday shopping frenzy in the US plays out very differently, with consumers elbowing each other and even getting into fights in their attempts to grab heavily discounted flat-screen televisions or Xbox gaming consoles in stores like Walmart.

How the world’s two best-known shopping events play out highlights not just the sheer spending power of Chinese shoppers and general consumer sentiment amid growing economic uncertainty in an escalating US-China trade war, but also the major differences in retail ecosystems in the top two economies.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, often marks the start of the holiday shopping season and counts as one of the biggest shopping days in the US. For decades, retailers would begin advertising holiday sales from Black Friday, offering shoppers discounts on their Christmas shopping. Last year, some 77 million shoppers went to physical stores to shop on Black Friday, with consumers spending about US$5 billion online, according to a joint National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics survey in the US.

That stands in stark contrast with China, where the biggest shopping day for the world’s most populous country happens almost exclusively online. The annual November 11 Singles’ Day sale across Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms racked up US$30.8 billion this year, topping records and dwarfing online sale numbers of Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. (It should be noted that the final numbers included transactions made on Lazada, Alibaba’s Southeast Asian e-commerce subsidiary.)

China’s online-driven shopping behaviour stems largely from a leapfrogging of organised retail, where chain stores – like supermarket or hypermart chains – sell goods to hordes of consumers.