'DOUBLE 11' IS STILL CONSUMERS’ FAVORITE

What is the hottest word among Chinese netizens these days? It's the “Bachelor’s Day Promotion” or Singles Day Promotion. Almost every netizen has got the invitation for this ceremony whether or not you are a bachelor.

About Singles Day Promotion in China

November 11th has become a special festival during recent years. With four characters of “1”, this date was named as Bachelor’s Day. On this day, young people will hold bachelor parties to create couples or simply have fun. Some choose to end their bachelor life by showing love or proposing for marriage.

In 2009, Alibaba held the first Double Eleven Shopping Festival on Taobao.com, storming the online shopping for the very first time. Three years later, with coming 2012's Bachelor’s Day, more than 10,000 businesses, cooperating with e-commerce sites, are poised to rock the shopping festival again.

Participants took actions to meet this festival. Some clothes manufactures began to hoard products for this winter from August. And they made full preparation on supplying chains and staff arrangements.

China Express Association organized “Double Eleven” meetings to discuss measurements.  Major logistics companies like EMS, Shentong, Yuantong, Home Delivery... are going to recruit thousands of new staffs to meet the need of peak online shopping periods.

Big Promotions on Major Online Retail Websites

Big promotions in the name of celebrating Nov 11 Bachelor's Day usually start at the very beginning of November with huge discounts and give aways lined up.

Some shopping platforms start early; 360buy started its one-month “Desert Storm” Promotions in Oct 10, offering coupons which value 50 million Yuan in total.

Suning started promotions called “Zero Purchasing Within 300-hundred Yuan”. After spending 300 hundred yuan on suning.com, consumers could get coupons with the same value. Coupons could also be used in more than 1700 offline Suning stores.

Gome Online Mall continuingly made efforts to supply goods at reduced prices, which scaled 1 billion Yuan in total, lowering the online prices for approximately 40%.

Tmall advanced rushing purchases of coupons. Successive rounds of promotions are started at 10:00, 14:00, 20:00 every day until Bachelor’s Day. Besides Tmall, Alibaba supported Taobao to take part in this shopping festival. More than 10,000 businesses are involved, which is 5 times of that compared to last year.

Moreover, Dangdang has fired its “Fire Promotions” from Nov 9, which will also last until Nov 11. In the meantime, it will celebrate its third anniversary.

More than price wars

You may wonder what the driving force of these crazy promotions is. Bachelor’s Day Promotion may be the most important timing to achieve annual revenue goal. Take Suning as an example. According to its latest quarterly financial report, it achieved sales of 9.5 billion yuan in the last 3 quarters. Though representing increase, there is a huge gap between the present performances with its sales goal of 20 billion Yuan. Year-end promotions are quite significant for Suning.

Basically, e-commerce cannot break away from its essence of retailing. Besides prices, they also compete on product varieties, users’ experience and resources. That is to say, this war is not only a challenge for promotion ability, but also a test of storage, logistics and capitals.

Both of Gome and Suning joined their online and offline channels, leading the whole industry to develop in the department store-oriented way.

Dangdang entered Tmall as a flagship stores of books and commodities. Previously, No.1 Store, New Egg and Yintai had stepped into Tmall. Suning officially acquired the Red Child as well as drew in Vancl and LAFASO, from which we can see its ambition to capture commodities categories.

If your business offers online purchase to Chinese consumers, November's Bachelor's Day should definitely be part of your annual sales strategy. Of course, it does not necessarily mean you should join the competition. But, if you do, timing and preparation are crucial to achieve successful online sales.