Zhang Qian

zhqcindy@163.com

WITHIN the 12 hours until noon yesterday, Single’s Day, Shenzhen residents’ total spending on Tmall, a shopping platform of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, ranked second among cities in Guangdong Province, following the provincial capital Guangzhou, according to the company.

Single’s Day is the world’s largest online shopping day. This year is particularly poignant because it is the 10th edition of the annual event — also known as Double Eleven — since it was created by Alibaba.

Shenzhen ranked first in Guangdong in terms of spending at last year’s annual 24-hour shopping spree.

Provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and Shanghai and Beijing took the first five places in spending by midday yesterday.

Tmall broke the 10-billion-yuan (US$1.44-billion) sales benchmark within the first two minutes and five seconds, while last year’s record was three minutes and one second. By 3:49 p.m., it had rocketed to 168.2 billion yuan, breaking last year’s 24-hour record within 16 hours, according to Sina Technology portal.

According to Alibaba, more than 19,000 overseas brands from 75 countries and regions have participated in this year’s shopping spree in China.

Young shoppers born after 1995 are believed to be the main contributors for the annual shopping gala, surpassing their predecessors born in the 1980s, said Jiang Xinjie, spokesperson of Tmall’s shopping festival.

Xie Furui, a new graduate from a local university, told Shenzhen Daily that he spent over 5,000 yuan on Tmall yesterday. Most of the products he bought were sports equipment, video game gear and some other stuff relating to his personal interests.

“I have been putting the items I wanted to buy into my shopping cart on Tmall since several weeks ago and stayed up until midnight yesterday to snatch more coupons offered by the online shops,” said Xie.

The young man estimated that he had at least saved nearly 2,000 yuan in discounts from the shopping festival.

Zhou Xiaoxian, 29, is a mother of two. She too has been closely watching the shopping spree to purchase daily necessities for her family and children since a month ago.

With discounts and coupons provided by both e-commerce platforms and online shops, Zhou was also able to save a certain amount of money compared with other times of the year.

But Zhou also said it feels more like “being forced” to consume on this particular day. She sees the prices of many products going up before and after the shopping spree, leaving her no choice but to buy them specifically on Nov. 11.

Sylvia Zi in her 20s is working at a company in Shenzhen. Unlike Zhou, she did not have clear targets but she ended up spending over 4,000 yuan yesterday.

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“Everyone around me was buying something, so I felt that I must also catch this opportunity to buy something that I might need,” said Zi.

Though debuted by Alibaba Group in 2009, the Double Eleven shopping festival is not limited to this e-commerce giant. In fact, almost all of the major e-commerce platforms including jd.com and suning.com are major players in the extravaganza.

In recent years, even physical stores at shopping malls begin to offer sales and discounts to attract consumers. A primary school teacher in Longgang District surnamed Ouyang said that she had spent around 40 minutes in line outside a physical store to buy half-price cotton-made infant products yesterday.

Imported goods are set to hog the Nov. 11 limelight with Tmall Global, the cross-border portal, providing 3,700 categories of foreign merchandise from 75 countries and regions on its platform.

In the first minutes of midnight trading, the top three destinations for imported goods were Japan, the United States and South Korea, China Daily reported.

The trend was predicted by research from global consultancy Oliver Wyman, which said that around 57 percent of surveyed consumers intended to buy overseas goods and such sales would make up one-third of total consumer spending.

Vice versa, some overseas Chinese also took the chance to purchase things they could not get in their host countries. Grace Ng living in Sydney, Australia had bought maternal-baby products on Tmall this year as an expectant mother even though a shipping fee was required.

“I need to pay a third-party delivery service to get my parcels delivered from China to Australia, but I think the fare is acceptable,” said Ng yesterday. According to her, the first 1 kg of product will cost 65 yuan and every extra 0.5 kg is an extra 21 yuan. She will need to pay 30 Australian dollars (US$21.7) for all of the things she purchased on Tmall during the shopping festival.

Official data showed that overseas consumers from a total of 164 countries and regions had made their orders on Tmall within the first minute after the midnight shopping festival began.