About 10 years ago, Chinese young people jokingly named each year’s November 11 as “Singles Day” because all digits for this day are the lonesome “1”. Alibaba Group saw a commercial opportunity and in 2009 launched an online sales festival to “celebrate” the Singles Day. Now it has become the world’s largest e-commerce as Alibaba’s platforms (B2C brand Tmall and C2C brand Taobao) alone sold goods worth of 168.2 billion yuan in 24 hours.
According to Lightspeed survey during November 3 and 6, Chinese netizens are most likely to shop at Tmall (76%), Taobao (63%) and JD.com (57%), in which Tencent owns a significant stake – the trio formed distant first tier platforms. Amazon.cn (16%), Suning (15%) and VIP.com (15%) formed the second tier.
Even though the competition for winning shoppers online has become more fierce, Kantar panelists showed the total spending during Singles Day will surely increase: 44% said “I will spend more than last year”, followed by 30% said, “more or less same as last year”. Only 14% said, “I will spend less”.
In terms of budget, the largest bracket is 1,001 – 2,000 yuan (22%), followed by 501 yuan – 1,000 yuan (18%) and 2,001 – 4,000 yuan (5%). About 2% said they have prepared more than 10,000 yuan for this annual occasion!
As e-commerce becomes more sophisticated in China, Chinese consumers are looking for things beyond physical goods: while 89% said they plan to buy physical goods, 19% said they would buy services online and 18% mentioned virtual goods.
The hottest physical goods categories are apparel (71%), shoes (51%) and food (48%), followed by three key important FMCG categories: household goods (39%), personal care goods (35%) and cosmetics (34%). On average each respondent plan to buy goods from 4.48 categories.
Paid membership of online video sites (49%), financial products (44%) and online services (such as cloud storage) (37%) are most mentioned virtual goods. Among services, people mentioned tour services (54%), hotel accommodations (47%) and plane tickets (31%) most.
The Kantar survey also asked brand attitudes during this Singles Day. Lots of respondents regard this as a rare chance to try out their preferred premium brands which they usually couldn’t afford: 60% said: “I will buy those brands that I have always liked but haven’t tried because of high price”. It clearly offered an opportunity for premium brands to launch smaller-volume packages to lure more consumers to try them out and grow penetration rate.
Brand loyalty will pay off on this day as well: 51% said they would continue to buy the brands they have always bought, only 14% said they would try unfamiliar brands simply because they’ll be cheaper on this day.
This article was originally published on Kantar.com
