With the fast growing cross-border e-commerce market in China, all major e-commerce companies are playing “Black Friday” card in China to further push their cross-border shopping sales.
Black Friday is the first day following Thanksgiving Day each year, which is generally considered as the start of the Christmas shopping season. Black Friday is the shopping season with the largest discount in the United States and Europe. With uplifting of Chinese living standard and improving e-commerce, domestic demand for foreign goods rises. Black Friday will be an important turning point whether China’s cross-border online shopping market will step on a higher stair.
China’s cross-border retail market is still small and the cross-border e-commerce is still in its infancy. However, as encouraged by government’s policies and the industrial chain such as logistics, China’s cross-border e-commerce will continue to maintain steady and rapid development in the next few years. The cross-border e-commerce market in 2017 is expected to reach 20% of total import and export trade sales.
Related: Chinese Cross-border Online Shoppers Insights
Black Friday as the annual shopping carnival in American and European countries is an important opportunity to cultivate consumer cross-border online shopping habits. Ymatou, a cross-border online shopping website in China, gained 100 million yuan revenues (US$15.63 million) during Black Friday last year. With many e-commerce companies broadening their cross-border business such as Tmall Global Duty-Free Shop, Jingdong Worldwide and Jumei Global Store, Black Friday has attracted much attention this year.
Amazon China launched its Black Friday promotion from November 18th until December 5th 2015. And, Ymatou started from November 20th to November 30th this year. On the first day, consumers spent an average of 507 yuan (US$79.22) per order and per capita consumption of more than 1,000 yuan (US$156.25) according to Ymatou. Ymatou has covered 35 countries and regions to prepare for this event. Light luxury bags and clothes gained popularity different from the previous mother care products, skin-care products or digital products.
In 2014, the United States was the top cross-border online shopping importing country of China by transaction frequency among the 10 countries researched, followed by U.K. and Japan, which takes the place of Hong Kong. There were over 2,000 cross-border e-commerce enterprises in China on record according to China General Administration of Customs.
The cross-border online shopper was expected to reach 35.6 million by 2018 and total 1 trillion yuan (US$o.16 trillion) according to Chinese Commerce Research Center.
Also read: China Retail V.S. Online Shopping 2015