Singles’ Day– Online Shopping carnival

**By APD Writer Yang Siyao

**

Singles’ Day, also known as “double eleven”, which falls on November 11, is the biggest online shopping carnival in China.

According to media reports, online sales promotion became more complicated this year, such as pre-sale, coupons and red envelopes. Internet users complained: “We have to spend hours in studying various promotion rules when we make a purchase.”

“We have to spend hours in studying various promotion rules when we make a purchase.”

Even so, this year’s commercial holiday broke all previous records. One hundred million shoppers splashed out on the commercial holiday. They splurged one billion yuan (about 150 million US dollars) in 28 seconds. To our surprise, the sales figures of Alibaba exceeded 100 billion yuan (about 15 billion US dollars) in 9 hours.

The sales figures of Alibaba exceeded 15 billion US dollars in 9 hours.

This is good news for sellers but not that good for shoppers. Shopaholics self-mockingly said that they would like to chop their hands off after buying too much online. Many shoppers cried: “We have no money left for food. We're poor as a church mouse.”

In fact, Singles’ Day began as the anti-Valentine’s day for China’s single young people to get together and have fun. But now, Singles’ Day doesn’t really have a lot to do with being single. Singles’ Day is about online shopping.

How did this holiday become so commercialized? The answer is Alibaba, an online retail giant. Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief executive, sought to increase sales in 2009.So, he launched an annual online sales on November 11. In other words，Singles’ Day online shopping bonanza was initiated by Alibaba in 2009.

Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief executive

In the first year, Alibaba was the only online shopping site to offer discount and its sale was considerable. Many retailers including JD.com, another online retail giant, were then also aware of the potential of Singles’ Day and decided to follow suit. In the following years, online retailers discounted heavily to spur customers. This way of promotion worked as they expected with sales growing tremendously.

However, will the momentum of Singles’ Day sales bonanza maintain? It is hard to say. After all, it is fun for a while, but the novelty will wear off.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)