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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 have begun 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.

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.