China’s Singles Day – World’s Biggest Shopping Festival Explained

China’s biggest shopping festival is here, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s also the world’s biggest shopping event. To give you a scale of how massive the Singles Day (also known as Double Eleven) event is — in 2020 alone, the total sales during this shopping festival reached 498 billion yuan ($78 billion). In comparison, the Black Friday weekend sale in the US generated only around $22 billion in the same year. 

Undoubtedly, China’s massive population is to credit for these humongous figures, but there’s no denying that new-age interactive sales techniques like live stream commerce and a rapid expansion in the country’s logistics network (nearly 3 billion parcels were shipped between Nov 11-16 across China in 2020) has magnified the scale of this shopping event.

History of Singles Day Festival in China

Although Singles Day started off as a celebration of bachelors, today, it’s much more than that. 

The concept of celebrating the ‘single life’ started gaining traction in the college campuses of 90s China. Eventually, this idea spread across the country via the internet and other media. November 11 is celebrated as Singles Day due to its numerical significance. The date consists of four ‘1’ wherein ‘1’ stands for a ‘single’ person. So November 11 i.e. 11/11 represents four singles together.

But China’s Singles day had nothing to do with shopping until 2009 when Alibaba decided to popularize this day with a huge shopping event, much like the Black Friday in the US. Within a span of a few years, Singles Day went from the biggest shopping festival in China to the world’s biggest shopping spree, dwarfing big international shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, combined.

And, what was initially a 24-hour shopping window on November 11 has now expanded into a two to three week sales event. And it’s not just Alibaba,but all major retailers across China like JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Suning, participate in this mega sales festival.

Double Eleven in Numbers

To understand the massive scale of this shopping event, let’s take a quick look at some key stats over the past few years.

I mentioned that Singles Day was many times bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. So, here’s a simple bar chart comparing Singles Day sales figures to Thanksgiving sales in the US from Statistica.

As you can see in the chart above, the rate at which Singles Day sales have grown is quite astonishing. In 2015, Alibaba generated GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) worth $14.3 billion during the event, but by 2019, this figure grew to $38.4 billion. And last year, Alibaba managed to nearly double this figure, generating a massive GMV of over $76 billion! This dwarfs the GMV of Thanksgiving weekend sales in the US, which was only around $22 billion in 2020. 

Singles Day has managed to break records every year, and last year was no exception. Let’s take a quick look at the key figures from the Singles Day festival in 2020. 

Singles Day 2020

2020 (Nov 1 – 11) was the biggest Singles Day event till date for Alibaba and China, breaking all previous records.

• Last year between Nov 1 to 11, Alibaba alone generated around $78.1 billion in GMV (RMB 498.2 billion). Alibaba’s rival, JD.com booked around $42.47 billion in GMV (RMB 271.5 billion yuan) during the event.
• To give you some context, US’ thanksgiving weekend sales generated around $22 billion in GMV in 2020.
• During the first 11 days of the Double Eleven event, couriers processed and shipped over 3.9 billion parcels in China. A further 2.9 billion parcels were delivered between Nov. 11 – 16. 
• Alibaba’s logistics arm used more than 3000 charter flights and cargo ships to bring goods into China for this event last year.
  

The big 11/11 sale for 2021 is yet to kick off, but here’s what we know about the event so far. 

 

Singles Day 2021 – What to Expect?

This year’s Double 11 shopping event is expected to be Alibaba’s largest to date, with over 290,000 participating brands and more than 14 million discount deals available to the consumers. The mega sale event is expected to cater to over 900 million consumers.

There were some important changes made to the Double eleven sales event this year. 

1. The Double 11 sale event was held in two phases.
2. The first phase will start from November 1 to 3 (pre-sale starts from October 20), and the second will be on November 11, which is the day of the main event.
3. Another key change this year was the timing of the sale. Unlike previous years, wherein the pre-sales started at 0:00 AM, this year, retailers kicked off both the stages of pre-sale at 8 PM. So shoppers no longer had to stay up late to snap up their favorite products.
4. Green and eco-friendly products also got more attention this year. 

This year’s Double Eleven is already showing promise of becoming the largest sales event in history. A longer sales window for customers along with a longer list of brands participating in the event should ensure that it turns out to be much bigger than 2020. 

In the past two weeks alone, we’ve seen record-breaking sales figures from different brands. 

• More than 20,000 customers bought green home appliances in the first two hours of sale on Oct. 20, 2021, which reportedly helped save 300 tons of carbon emissions.
• Over US$1.7 billion worth of goods were sold by a celebrity host in just 12 hours of his live-streaming session at the start of the 11/11 sale.
• Shoppers bought iPhones worth 300 million yuan ($47 million) within a second after the sales kicked off on Nov 1. In just four minutes, the total iPhone sales during Singles Day exceeded the iPhone sales generated in an entire day in 2020. 
• Xiaomi sold products worth 7 billion yuan ($1.93 billion) on the first day of the Double Eleven sale. This included over 500,000 units of the Redmi Note 11 series alone. 

Singles Day not only generates massive sales for brands, but also indicates products that are gaining popularity among customers. So the first two weeks in November are among the most important periods for retailers in China. 

 

How can you participate in Double Eleven?

If you feel you are missing out on the fun, don’t worry as Alibaba’s international retail arm, Aliexpress has its own 11/11 sales event. While it’s not as big as the event in China, you’ll still find plenty of good deals and discount coupons on a wide variety of products this week. 

If you live in South East Asia, you can also participate in the local version of 11.11 events from retailers like Shopee and Lazada.