The Singles’ Day shopping festival in China has become more than a shopping festival. Call them cheap tricks or marketing innovations, the discounts and heavy promotions for Singles Day on e-commerce platforms are breaking sales records every year.
Initially created by netizens, China’s tongue-in-cheek Singles’ Day is also known as the “Double 11 festival”, falling on November 11. China’s ecommerce platforms have leveraged it into a massive promotions opportunity ever since its creation.
Tmall, JD.com, and Suning: what have they got this year?
Having achieved total transactions of RMB 91.2 billion (USD 14.3 billion) for Singles’ Day in 2015, Alibaba’s Tmall is expected to make a new record this year with four focuses: making the shopping experience more interactive by integrating it with live-streaming, virtual reality technology, and augmented reality games; introducing online sellers in mainland China to customers overseas; having nearly 100,000 offline stores participate online; and using big data for more intelligent recommendations to customers.
JD.com, on the other hand, has Walmart as its comrade in the war of Double 11. For Walmart, this cooperation may help it march into the e-commerce market on a large scale; for JD.com, Walmart’s global resources and brands are expected to add to JD.com’s strengths in cross-border e-commerce.
Earlier this month, the two parties launched a Walmart Global store on JD.com’s cross-border platform, JD Worldwide. The store went online last Monday to further enrich JD.com’s range of products, according to Walmart.
Suning is building an “offline wonderland” for Singles’ Day. In the Three Kingdom City, a tourist attraction in southern China, Suning is building another “city” with 111 traditional Chinese settings, 111 special snacks, and 11 challenging games for entertainment.
Two popular celebrities will be invited as “lords” of the city, as will 111 web celebrities who will live-stream the event day and night until the end of November 11th. The attraction will be open from November 8th.