An employee sorts packages for delivery ahead of the Singles’ Day shopping festival at Tianma E-commerce Industrial Park in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province on Tuesday. Photo: AFP
China’s leading e-commerce platforms reported strong sales for the first checkout window of this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, despite a cooling economy and weakening consumer sentiment.
Alibaba Group Holding said 102 brands on its retail network, which includes its flagship sites Taobao and Tmall, surpassed 100 million yuan (US$13.8 million) in gross merchandise value within an hour after the first round of sales opened for payments on Monday.
Those brands include homegrown white goods maker Haier Group, Midea Group and subsidiary Little Swan, and TCL Technology, all of which crossed the 100 million yuan mark within the first second, Alibaba said. Haier went on to surpass the 1 billion yuan mark in five minutes, while its live-streaming channel on Tmall crossed 100 billion yuan in the first 20 minutes, making it the first among its peers to reach that milestone.
Live stream views on Taobao Live in the first hour rose 600 per cent from last year, the Hangzhou-based company said.
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‘Flying Wolf’, China’s first AI-powered 3D automatic sorting system
‘Flying Wolf’, China’s first AI-powered 3D automatic sorting system
Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, kicked off its presales on October 24, allowing consumers to pay a deposit for products to secure discounts. Payments are to be completed during a two-part checkout period, the first of which opened at 8pm on Monday, while the second one begins at the same time on November 10.
JD.com, one of Alibaba’s main domestic rivals, also reported swift sales.
Several smartphone brands, including Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei Technologies Co and Honor, saw turnover surpass 100 million yuan within a second after the platform’s checkout window opened on Monday night, the e-commerce giant said in a WeChat article.
Turnover of home appliances exceeded 1 billion yuan within the first minute, the Beijing-based company said.
Douyin, the Chinese short video app run by TikTok owner ByteDance, said on WeChat that its presales reached more eyeballs this year, with products recording a 447 per cent jump in exposure during the first four days of the shopping event compared with last year.
Workers sort out and pack online orders in the Tianma E-commerce Industrial Park in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, on Tuesday. Photo: CNS
The Singles’ Day shopping festival, created by Alibaba in 2009, is the world’s largest online retail extravaganza. The annual bargain-hunting ritual, originally a 24-hour event on November 11, has in recent years stretched into a weeks-long event lasting from late October to mid-November, joined by new players such as short-video platform Kuaishou Technology and discount retailer Pinduoduo.
This year’s festival, however, is overshadowed by China’s economic woes. Total retail sales in the country increased just 2.5 per cent year on year to 3,774.5 billion yuan in September, compared with a 5.4 per cent rise in August, government data showed.
Almost 34 per cent of consumers recently surveyed by consulting firm Bain & Company said they expected to spend less on Singles’ Day this year, a jump from last year’s 9 per cent. “It is much higher than everything we have seen in the past, so a lack of confidence is very obvious,” said Kelly Liu, head of China retailing at Bain, in a media briefing in Shanghai last week.
