14 DAY TRIAL // Alibaba may have just found the secret to a successful online retailing campaign as it seeks to encourage people to buy something nice for themselves on Tuesday, November 11.
On Singles Day, a Chinese festival that celebrates people that aren’t in a relationship, Alibaba is encouraging everyone to buy themselves a gift on the date with the most 1s – 11.11. The event has become the biggest online shopping day, thanks in part to the efforts of the e-commerce giant Alibaba and it’s just about to get bigger.
The company holds promotions and sales each year on this day on its many sites. It is expected that this year’s sales will hit $8.18 billion (€6.56 billion), up 42 percent from last year.
The celebration started off as a joke among college students back in the ‘90s. It was originally called “Bachelor Day” since it was only young men that celebrated it, but as it got traction, it was adopted by all genders. It even has its own traditions, making it a proper holiday. For instance, people have to eat four dried dough sticks representing the four 1s in the date.
It’s not just shopping that’s popular on this day, but also blind-date parties and other matchmaking events, all with the purpose of bringing together single people.
About five years ago, the holiday’s marketing potential started to be exploited by e-commerce sites that started to hold its own 11.11 sales. TMall and Taobao, both belonging to Alibaba, are filled with various deals, which is paying off for the giant company. For instance, last year, Alibaba sold twice as much on November 11 than all US companies did on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, combined.
Amazon is having a try, too
Amazon tried to syphon some of the wealth too, launching similar campaigns on its Chinese site, but wasn’t too successful with it. Even if it didn’t provide numbers for its sales last year, when it joined in the tradition for the first time, it couldn’t have been too much, or they’d have bragged about it.
For comparison’s sake, Alibaba alone sold merchandise worth of $5.75 billion (€4.61 billion) on November 11. The biggest online shopping record in the United States is kept by the Cyber Monday of 2013, when all companies’ sales reached $1.46 billion (€1.17 billion).
Now that Alibaba wants to give the holiday an international flavor, everything goes and the sales could skyrocket even higher.
