Day: November 16, 2013

In this post I will mainly focus on discussing how social media contribute to the rapid growth of sale record in just 2 years for the double 11 festival.

I will first share my personal experience of how social media influence my on the double 11 festival. I actually get to know double 11 as the “world’s largest online shopping festival” this year. Before that double 11 is only the single’s day to my knowledge. I saw lots of posts on sina weibo regarding the double 11 promotion form various online retailers.  At the same time, i also receive lot of “push” from several brands’ wechat official account. On the day of double 11, I saw lots of friend posts on what they have bought in this festival on weibo. There is also a banner on weibo home page counting the monetary sale volume on the day.

Alicia Yap, the head of China Internet research at Barclays, said in a report yesterday that “Weibo has become an important medium for Alibaba to promote the event and direct traffic” to its market-leading online retail portals Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com.  They believed that promoting shopping information and discussion on transactions, services and products through social media could increases the public’s interest in interacting with e-commerce and their understanding of online shopping.

Another online retail giant 51buy.com owned by tencent use its own platform wechat to carry the marketing campaign. The campaign allowed smartphone owners to view and order products available on 51buy with relative ease through WeChat’s menus, and was aimed at residents in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The result turned out to be excellent as out of  600,000 51buy orders made on Singles Day, orders via WeChat exceeded 80,000.

It’s clearly that social media plays an important role in this massive online shopping festival, and we will see this trend keep growing.

Every Nov.11^th is an untraditional festival among young generations in china, which we called Single’s Day.  It’s because novermber.11^th is the only day in a year that have four 1s – 11.11. The single’s day is a representative product of Chinese interesting college culture.

As the young generation gradually graduate from school and get into the society, the culture of celebrating Single’s day has been brought to the society as a whole.

And now Double 11 is not only just the Single’s day for young people but became a online shopping festival when Taobao, T-mall, and 360 buy those giant online retailer take the advantage of this Single’s day culture by having massive discount promotion.

This double 11 shopping festival officially starts in the year of 2011 and it grows rapidly every year. In 2012, the transaction hit 19 billion in one day. This year, it almost double the amount and hit 36 billion!

The rationale behind this Double 11 massive online discount promotion is for online retailer to stranger the promotion period with offline sales that happen mostly in October (National Day) December (Christmas) and February (lunar new year).

This Double 11 online shopping festival is a one-day event that purely developed the online retailers.  Not only they spent heavily on marketing efforts to promote the sale, the retailers also use 50% off promotion or even lower discount to attract customers. As the online shopping becoming incredibly popular in china, online retailers smartly seize the opportunity by integrating the Chinese college Culture of Single’s day.  One of the factors that contribute to the success of this Double 11 Festival is the online retailers have a very clear target audience of this events, which is young generations aged 18- 26 who are tech savvy, like online shopping and social media. They also leverage this customer bases through using them as a “word of mouth” marketing channel to expose this events to mass market, their peers, family members who maybe older and may even not enjoy online shopping.  But who do not like discount, especially such huge discount? In my opinion, double 11 can be serve as a trail to encourage people who don’t like online shopping or who haven’t tried the online shopping to take advantage of this sale events to actually shop online. By letting them experience the good side of online shopping, this part of market can be potentially transformed to regular online- shoppers. However, many people also said the nature of this events is the price competition, It can only raise the awareness of the online shopping industry but not actually help the industry with sustainable growth.  Since Double 11 is only event that only 3 years old, I really would like to see how it grow in the future and how can it affect the online shopping industry in china as a whole.