Singles' Day promotions keep retailers busy
- Details
- Category: Ningbo News
- Published: Tuesday, 05 November 2013 14:50
While shoppers are waiting excitedly for the Single's Day shopping spree, both online and traditional retailers as busy as ever with all kinds of promoting sales.
As an unofficial Chinese festival, Singles' Day, which falls on Nov 11, is celebrated mostly by unattached young people. Online shop owners launch promotions during the festival to boost sales during the traditionally slow business season. Chinese online shoppers spent 19.1 billion yuan (USD$ 3.11 billion) on last Single's Day, with 393 million yuan spent by Ningbo internet users.
For the upcoming Singles' Day, retailers are integrating online and offline promotions, which seems to give more discounts and deals to consumers. While spending time looking for deals online and offline, consumers are also concerned with the possible delivery delay caused by the mass promotion.
With the coming of Singles' Day, local retail market is turning hot. Ningbo Intime Department announced on Wednesday it will officially start its year-end celebration shopping promotion in its traditional and online stores on November 11, or the Singles' Day. Around 50 best sellers will be available at big discounts as low as 55 percent off. Meanwhile, the country's largest e-commerce company, Alibaba, also announced that it will pay for data fee for online shoppers in Hunan, Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. To handle the surging number of deliveries on Single's Day, courier firms encouraged online shoppers to pick up their packages in the 208 stations in Ningbo.
Tmall.com, a major retail site of Alibaba, has rented over 100 cargo aircrafts to handle the massive deliveries generated on singles Day. It also opened 9,761 stations in 64 cities across the country for online shoppers to pick up their packages. Ningbo has 208 service stations.
