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Alibaba 11.11 Shopping Festi

China's Biggest Post Pandemic Shopping Season Is Coming up. Here Are the Details

Aron Chen

posted on October 21, 2020 7:34 pm

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba aims to drive post-Covid economy recovery and consumption spree with its annual Double 11 shopping festival.

Coined as a "Global Shopping Festival" this year, the company announced on a Tuesday launch ceremony in Shanghai that it is adding more cross-border shopping experiences into the biggest post-pandemic online shopping event to date. The company estimates about 800 million consumers, mostly in China, participating in this year's festival, with the number of new products debuting on Tmall, Alibaba's Business-to-Consumer e-commerce website exceeding 2 million, more than doubled from last year.

Unlike in previous years, when the most important sales events generally happen within a single time period that lasts a few days before or on, this year's Double 11 sales and other promotional events will be placed within two ales windows, with the first one between November 1 and 3, then the second one on the 11, the actual date where the namesake of Double 11 came from, according to Alibaba. 

The idea behind the two windows is rather simple, as Alibaba wants to enable merchants to double their promotions so that they can double their sales, noticing the eagerness of participation by small and medium-sized merchants on its platform is quite high this year. Essentially, distributing the events into two windows makes smaller sellers, whose businesses have been hit hard during the lockdowns earlier this year, worry less about spending too much and fighting for promotional resources on Alibaba's ecosystem within a single, time-limited window.

A list of all promotional details of this year's Double 11 from Alibaba in Chinese.
A list of all promotional details of this year's Double 11 from Alibaba in Chinese.

Apart from online marketplace websites such as Tmall and Taobao, Alibaba's payment app Alipay, operated by Ant Group, the fintech subsidiary that has just been given approval to IPO by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a few days ago, is also ramping up its support to digitize operation and boost sale for smaller merchants across the country

Small, and even micro merchants of one person, will be able to participate in this year's Double 11 through Alipay's digital lifestyle platform. By searching within the Alipay's local service offering, consumer can redeem local discount and voucher subsidized by Alibaba and/or local governments to spend on everything from major restaurant chains to street stalls and mom-and-pop shops.

The participation of Alipay’s lifestyle can be seen as the extended commitment made by Alibaba in March when it said that it would open up its platform to 40 million service providers, enabling these third-party vendors to offer local service such as food delivery and hotel booking, retail, healthcare on its mobile payment platform.

In order to offer more convenient lifestyle service, other Alibaba's business units will also take part in this year's Double 11, including local services division Ele.me, online travel service provider Fliggy, and ticketing platforms Taopiaopiao and Damai.

What's worth mentioning for is the addition of duty-free shopping in Double 11 this year. The global travel and tourism-related retail industries are severely disrupted by the pandemic. Although China has mostly reigned in the domestic transmissions, the pandemic is still raging worldwide, causing people to cancel their travel lans and spend less on cross-border purchases. Alibaba plans to make more foreign cosmetics brands and duty-free shops available for domestic shoppers in the annual shopping festival, slashing the prices on a decent variety of luxury products normally only sold in physical duty-free shops.

Alibaba signed a strategic partnership deal with Switzerland's Dufry earlier this month, allowing the former to tap more into the duty-free shopping industry, and the latter to digitize its shopping experiences for Chinese domestic shoppers to make up for the lost in sales mid-pandemic. The deal also involved Alibaba buying some shares of Dufry.

In fact, this year's Double 11 may become have the largest international presence since the whole idea launched in 2009, according to Alibaba. To meet Chinese consumers' increasing demand for international products, Tmall Global, Alibaba's cross-border e-commerce website, will bring in more than 2,600 new overseas brands.

Tapping into livestream e-commerce has also become a hot trend in China this year as more businesses across sectors, including smartphones and home appliances, found a new way in livestreaming to reach customers amid lockdowns and quarantine measures imposed nationwide to contain the spread of COVID-19. That trend is staying on as a main theme of this year's Double 11. In addition to a roster of top-of-the-line influencers, Alibaba also said that about 400 company executives and some 300 celebrities will also hold livestreaming sessions on Taobao during the shopping festival, promoting products ranging from cosmetics, electronics, to even cars and real estate.

Numbers that are important to Alibaba, such as gross merchandise value and sales per second, will likely break records again. This year's Double 11 will no doubt lead the country's, likely even the entire world's biggest shopping season amid an ongoing global pandemic that has dragged the economy down significantly.