TECH

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.

By Joel Joseph