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Singles' Day (11.11)
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Alibaba’s Singles’ Day shopping bonanza loses lustre amid China’s Big Tech crackdown, competition from live streaming

  • China’s tech and antitrust crackdowns have added pressure on e-commerce platforms as the world’s biggest shopping festival faces declining popularity
  • Live-streaming e-commerce has emerged as a popular alternative for deals, boosting the year-round popularity of ByteDance’s Douyin and Kuaishou

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Alibaba’s Tmall promotes the 2021 Singles’ Day shopping festival ahead of presales, which started on October 20. The world’s largest shopping festival is less of a draw this year than it used to be amid increased competition and a regulatory crackdown from Beijing. Photo: Handout
Jane ZhangandTracy Qu
For six years in a row, Ding Xiaojuan has “chopped” hands for the Singles’ Day shopping festival, a popular expression among Chinese consumers describing an obsession with online retail that is so out of control that they want to cut off their hands to stop bleeding money.

“I set alerts and stayed up late until midnight in previous years to pay for my orders so that I could get extra presents for being the first batch to pay,” the 39-year-old said, attributing the behaviour to being “crazy” in the past.

That craziness has subsided, according to Ding, who says she feels less passionate about the world’s largest shopping spree these days. Her budget for the annual event is now about 2,000 yuan (US$312), a quarter of what she used to spend.

“There are so many options now and I found products are not necessarily the cheapest during Singles’ Day,” said Ding, who works at a secondary school in Enshi, in China’s central Hubei province. “Sometimes you can find real bargains via live streaming, even during normal days.”

Started in 2009 by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, Singles’ Day has evolved from a one-day festival on November 11 into a multibillion-dollar event spanning weeks that major Chinese e-commerce sites promote heavily, making it closely watched by industry insiders and analysts as a bellwether for consumer spending in the country.
After more than a decade, though, there are signs that Singles’ Day is losing some of its lustre. There have been complaints in recent years about increasingly abstruse discount methods, requiring shoppers to make complicated calculations. The emergence of more shopping festivals and platforms has also given consumers less reason to hold out for Alibaba’s shopping event.
Live-streaming e-commerce, for example, has surged in popularity on short video platforms like Kuaishou Technology and its rival Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is also operated by ByteDance, during the pandemic. Alibaba’s Taobao Live is also a big player in this space.

“Five, six years ago, it was still a two-horse race with Alibaba and JD.com. And now with Pinduoduo and all those social commerce platforms and live-streaming platforms coming in, there’s intense competition for a share of [consumers’] wallets,” said James Yang, partner at consulting firm Bain & Company’s consumer products, retail and strategy practices division.

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