The Double Eleven shopping festival already started on November 1, with consumers showing growing enthusiasm for buying electronics. Xiaomi Corp said that sales of its consumer electronic products on e-commerce platforms and in off-line retail stores exceeded CNY7 billion on November 1. Within the first hour of the shopping festival, during which many discounted products are on offer, the company sold more than 500,000 units of its Redmi Note 11 series smartphones. Data from e-commerce platform JD also showed that the turnover of Apple products on JD in the first four hours of the gala – originally meant to allow singles to buy products for themselves on November 11 – increased 200% year-on-year, while sales of electronics from Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo during the first hour all exceeded those in the same period last year. Realme, a fast-growing Chinese smartphone vendor, said that its sales in the first 16 minutes of the shopping festival exceeded its whole-day sales on November 1 of last year. Fu Liang, an independent telecom analyst, said this year’s Double Eleven shopping festival comes at an important time for Chinese consumer electronics companies, especially smartphone vendors, as they vie to fulfill annual sales targets after demand was lower than expected in recent month.
In September, shipments of phones in China hit 21.44 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 8.1%. As a result, Chinese smartphone brands are scrambling to attract consumers with new products and discounts for older models, as they bet big on the Double Eleven shopping gala to boost sales. Lin Keyu, Analyst at Counterpoint Research, said it is also worth noting that during this year’s shopping festival there were no sub-CNY1,000 smartphone models, partly because companies are offering better products.
Payment will be more convenient this year as Cloud QuickPass will officially debut. This is the latest example of removing payment difficulties, after 85% of all merchants on Taobao said they have accepted transactions through Cloud QuickPass. Digital payments, albeit ubiquitous in China, used to be a matter of choice between Alipay, WeChat Pay, UnionPay or some other mobile wallet.Today, such barriers are being torn down. For instance, WeChat users need only scan a Cloud QuickPass – offered by UnionPay – to complete transactions in the blink of an eye. Alipay and WeChat Pay – covering over 90% of the country’s third-party payment market transactions – said they are enhancing online and offline integration with China UnionPay to allow a seamless payment experience. In the past, users of Taobao, the e-commerce portal of Alibaba, could only make transactions via its mobile wallet Alipay by binding bank cards with Alipay accounts. Now, China’s antitrust authorities are forcing interconnectivity to restore market order by reining in monopolistic behavior, experts said. Fan Yifei, Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said during a payment and clearance forum in September that the orderly interconnectivity of payment interfaces among platform companies helps boost fair competition, and that exclusive and discriminatory payment agreements should be banned.
According to a report by JD.com, beauty and makeup, healthcare and maternal and baby products are the top three best-selling categories of imported products. Consumers prefer to buy overseas products from the United States, Japan, France, Germany and Switzerland on JD. The proportion of female consumers who purchase imported merchandise is higher than that of male consumers, and the young generation aged below 30 is the fastest-growing consumer group for imported products. Data from the General Administration of Customs showed the import and export volume of China’s cross-border e-commerce reached CNY886.7 billion in the first half of this year, up nearly 29% year-on-year.
Some 98% of all the orders placed by consumers in the Chinese mainland may be shipped free of charge during this Double 11 shopping festival, according to reports. Couriers delivered 569 million packages on November 2, a year-on-year increase of 28.54%, according to the State Post Bureau. China's sophisticated logistics system has an organized chain with delivery enterprises, e-commerce platforms and industry workers cooperating closely with each other, which maximally guarantees a smooth delivery flow, Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute told the Global Times. He Hui, Director of the China Logistics Information Center, added that the country's efforts in continuously improving the infrastructure, such as constructing railways and highways and delivery companies opening up more stations, aims to cover as many provinces and counties as possible. The average Chinese consumer receives more packages than those in other countries, e.g. more than three times the number of packages than an American, the Global Times reports.
