Double 11 Online Shopping Festival in China – Part 2
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.