New trends point to strong growth potential: analysts
Chinese shoppers, in a strong show of their massive spending power, have splurged a record amount of money buying everything from fresh food to electronics to clothes during the annual Singles' Day shopping spree on Saturday.
Fresh trends this year suggest the limit has not been reached, at least in the short term, to the solid momentum for the world's largest shopping event.
During the 24-hour period on Saturday, Alibaba's Tmall.com, the largest e-commerce platforms in China, generated a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of 168.2 billion yuan, smashing last year's record. Its biggest rivalry JD.com also announced sales of 127.1 billion yuan during the first 11 days of November.
Singles' Day, which falls on November 11 each year, was initially started by young Chinese bachelors to celebrate their unattached status but has been turned into a shopping extravaganza by Alibaba and other online shopping platforms and, a barometer for Chinese consumerism since 2009.
"The record-breaking numbers this year have proven once again that the spending power of Chinese shoppers remains solid, and the Singles' Day shopping event has truly become a global event," Lu Zhenwang, founder of Shanghai Wanqing Commerce Consulting, told the Global Times on Sunday.
This year's event kicked off on Friday night with a televised gala by Alibaba that was filled with Chinese and foreign celebrities and sales promotions that left many shoppers with little choice but to give in to their duoshou, a phrase coined to describe impulsive online shopping habits.
"The discounts are quite big. Merchants offer big discounts and shopping platforms also offer price cuts," said a Beijing resident in her 20s, who only gave her surname as Huang. She said she received a 65 percent discount on some items and saved a further 1,000 yuan from the platform on her total online spending of nearly 10,000 yuan.
Those attractive discounts, coupled with an increased number of big foreign and domestic brands participating in this year's sales event "probably helped a lot in generating these huge sales numbers," Lu said.
He said that further globalization of the online shopping spree, reflected in both foreign brands and buyers from outside the Chinese mainland, also helped.
Alibaba said there were a total of 15 million products from 140,000 brands that took part in the sales event. More than 60,000 foreign brands and merchants were included and there were 225 countries that saw completed transactions. JD.com also listed many foreign brands, including luxury ones in its promotions.
However, challenges and concerns persist for both companies and shopping platforms, analysts and consumers pointed out.
"There is still vicious competition going on between the shopping sites and merchants and some aspects of it are not healthy and sustainable," Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based independent industry analyst, told the Global Times.
Huang said that she also has concerns over product quality and pricing tricks.
"I don't know how it's possible for them to give such big discounts without losing money," she said.
But Liu said the Singles' Day shopping phenomenon has been expanding quickly into more industries offline and is impacting daily lives.
The shopping event can even impact consumers who do not participate. Some describe a certain degree of peer pressure because conversations with friends and family members were focused on what they bought and how much money they spent.
"You don't have anything to say because you didn't participate, so you feel a little left out," one consumer said.
