GUANGZHOU, China — The biggest shopping event in the world, Singles Day, is underway but China’s e-commerce giants will have to deal with economic growth potentially slowing as well as continued scrutiny from domestic regulators.
Singles Day — also known as Double 11 — takes place on Nov. 11 in China and is widely believed to have begun in the 1990s in universities as men celebrated being single. In 2009, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched the first shopping event on that day, offering heavy discounts on its Tmall shopping platform.
Many of China’s online shopping companies have since jumped on the bandwagon, making Singles Day bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. combined.
Promotions begin earlier each year and are no longer limited to a 24-hour window.
JD.com and Alibaba kicked off promotions on Oct. 20, allowing customers to pay a deposit for items and secure the big discounts. Further discounts and promotions rolled out Sunday for JD.com and Monday for Alibaba.
Rising competition
The massive shopping event comes amid concerns over slowing growth in China’s economy and a recent slew of sluggish retail sales data.
But there are indications that consumers are still willing to spend on this year’s shopping festival. In a 3,000 person survey carried out by Bain & Company and published last week, slightly more than half (52%) of respondents said they were planning to spend more than last year, while only 8% said they were planning to decrease their spending.
Last year, Singles Day across all platforms raked in gross merchandise value of 840 billion yuan ($131.3 billion). GMV is a figure that shows the total value of orders across an e-commerce company’s platforms.
Jonathan Cheng, a partner at Bain, said he expects high levels of participation and sales growth. However, incumbents Alibaba and JD face rising competition from rivals such as Pinduoduo as well as the Chinese version of TikTok called Douyin, which is pushing further into e-commerce.
“There is a lot stronger competition from all types of platforms. It started out as an Alibaba festival, and it has now evolved into a general shopping festival,” Cheng said in an interview.
More than 50% of consumers in Bain’s survey said that they were planning to shop on three or more platforms during Double 11 this year.
