▲ Chinese shoppers
Major e-commerce platforms have entered into a massive discount competition ahead of Singles' Day (Double Eleven), China's largest online shopping festival.
According to the Chinese state-run English-language newspaper Global Times, major e-commerce firms including Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin have successively kicked off preliminary promotional events ahead of Singles' Day on November 11.
Started by Alibaba in 2009, Singles' Day was originally a massive one-day discount event held on November 11, but it has recently been shifting into a long-term promotional event for the industry lasting nearly a month.
Companies are inducing consumer purchases by combining cash discount coupons, limited-time subsidies, pre-orders, and government consumption-boosting subsidies.
Following JD.com's launch of an event starting the previous afternoon allowing consumers to purchase items directly at Singles' Day discounted prices without a deposit, the company has put forward limited-quantity super-special price events in some promotions where items like the iPhone 16 Pro, Dell laptops, and Sony cameras can be bought for 1 yuan (approx. 200 won).
Alibaba's Tmall is offering discount benefits even when purchasing just a single item, moving away from the previous method where multiple products had to be bought together to receive a discount.
Douyin has also joined the promotional race by applying an immediate 15% discount to certain products.
In particular, home appliances and smartphones can benefit from platform discounts combined with additional consumer goods replacement subsidies from the Chinese government, prompting companies to leverage overlapping discount benefits to secure consumers.
The Singles' Day event is scheduled to continue until around November 11 next month, with the discount competition expected to peak between the evening of November 10 and November 11.
Hu Qimu, a professor at Huachiao University, explained regarding Singles' Day, which is expected to see a concentration of consumption, "It can help improve purchase conversion rates and reduce the burden on logistics networks, aiding the long-term development of distribution and manufacturing."
However, some evaluations suggest that the fever surrounding Singles' Day has weakened somewhat compared to the past.
Professor Hu said, "As the operational model of Singles' Day has evolved over a long period, the room for new innovations has diminished," adding, "Consumers have also become more rational and do not concentrate their purchases in a short period."
Singles' Day is also drawing attention as a key indicator to gauge Chinese consumer sentiment and household spending capacity, given that Chinese authorities are pursuing domestic demand revitalization as a major economic task.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, retail sales of online goods and services in China from January to August this year reached 13.48 trillion yuan (approx. 2,691 trillion won), an increase of 4.6% from the same period last year.
This is barely half the growth rates recorded for the January-to-August periods in 2024 (8.9%) and 2025 (9.6%).
Professor Hu evaluated, "Preliminary promotional events serve as a stage to intensively test consumer trust," and "Platforms are trying to convert short-term discount events into a continuous driving force for consumption expansion."
(Photo: Yonhap News)
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