It was another record-breaking year for e-commerce in China as ‘Singles Day’ saw more than 30 billion yuan ($5 billion) in sales, boosted largely by consumers shopping with smartphones. Chinese online retailers gave huge discounts to unattached shoppers on Nov. 11 resulting in a 24-hour online shopping frenzy with sales up almost 60 percent from last year.
Singles’ Day, named for the number of ones in its date, began as a tradition on Chinese college campuses in which single students would shop, eat, and send gifts to one another. Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com took advantage of this by creating an online shopping platform on Tmall.com that featured significant discounts for shoppers on Singles Day.
Now Singles’ Day is online sellers’ chance to rake in the big bucks. According to China Daily, Alibaba’s online payment platform Alipay recorded more than 1 billion yuan in transactions within the first six minutes on Singles’ Day. Purchases made exclusively from smartphones also reached 1 billion yuan within the first 70 minutes. By 1:30 p.m. sales had surpassed 20 billion yuan and had also exceeded last year’s total daily sales obtained by online marketplaces such as Tmall and Taobao.
Alibaba’s data showed that 13.7 million buyers placed orders in the first minute of Singles’ Day sales.
Such an exponential increase in sales can largely be attributed to the ubiquity of the smartphone in China, which grants shoppers direct and unlimited access to shopping portals straight from their devices. According to research firm Analysys International, the number of Chinese mobile Internet users will soon surpass 700 million.
Over 120 million Chinese netizens have downloaded Taobao’s mobile app.
Meanwhile, Alibaba’s competitors are devising various strategies to lure customers to their platforms. Electronics vendor Jing Dong Mall (JD.com) is promising on-time delivery, something that Alibaba has struggled with over the past year. Tmall is using incentives and discounts to attract customers. It has given out cash incentives totaling 300 million yuan to encourage customers to share cash vouchers with friends via microblogs. Tmall also partnered up with over 20,000 merchants to cut product prices by up to 50 percent.
