Chinese Market on Single’s day

I was listening to The Economist during breakfast while they are discussing Chinese market, specifically the Chinese Single’s day 11.11 online sales.

On my social network is flooded with 11.11, even quite a lot of UK brands that are not selling in China market are trying to please the Chinese consumers in the UK, and have a quite generous discount on 11.11.

I know few hours later, millions of Chinese will be busy clicking their shopping cart, via their mobile phone, tablet, laptops and desktops. Because I, myself, already got quite a lot of products in my shopping cart waiting for 11.11, although I am based in the UK.

So why Chinese consumers shopping on Chinese single’s day 11.11?

11.11 contains four 1, and has been casually by Chinese singles to celebrate their single status since the 1990s, We call it single’s day (Guang gun Jie), It is kind of anti valentine’s day.

In 2009, Alibaba started to use this for a shopping day, giving huge discount to consumers, and it becomes very successful. Last year, the transaction has reached 57 billion yuan (£5.7 billion) on Alibaba last year on Single’s day. This year the sales on 11.11 is expect to increase, the average shopping cart value is around 1700 yuan (£170)

What can you expect from Chinese Single’s day this year?

  • six million products from over 40,000 merchants,
  • more than 30,000 brands from 25 countries.
  • nearly 800 million packages

Different from previous Chinese Single’s day sale, this year single’s day sales goes global.
Lots of international brands selling on Alibaba’s online mall Tmall include P&G, Unilever, Burberry, Estee Lauder, Zara, Huggies, Macy’s  , Costco, Apple and Nike.

I also observed quite a lot of UK brands are selling on Tmall global. They selling into China through cross-border e-commerce.

Performance, based on one best-selling product presold numbers so far for Chinese single’s day

Tangle Teezer, best-selling product presold 9773 pieces
Grow Gorgeous, best-selling product presold 1964 pieces
NYR, best-selling product presold 3703 pieces
EVE LOM, best-selling product presold 1611 pieces

Tangle Teezer 1111

1111 Grow Gorgeous




1111 NYR

1111 EVELOM