Tmall has promotion activities in all major holidays or festivals in China, such as Teacher’s Day, Mid Autumn Festival, National Day, Double Ninth Festival and Spring Festivals, not to mention some popular western festivals like Christmas and Thanksgiving.
One of the biggest promotion activity is not from the festivals we mentioned above. Tmall created Double 11, which is on Nov 11, nicknamed after Bachelor’s Day by Chinese. Taobao normally can expect sales of over billion yuan on one single day. Last year, the total sales exceed 3 billion yuan (USD 490 million).
Although it seems rather early to talk about Double 11, it’s in November. But Tmall and retailers, logistic companies have already began preparing for the biggest promotion.
On November 11 2012, the Double 11 promotion on Tmall and Taobao attracted 147 million unique visitors and 30 million users to purchase, and the number of transactions hit 100 million.
Just seconds past midnight on November 11, 10 million users were online at the same time. 10 mins later, turnover of transactions paid through Alipay reached 250 million yuan (USD 40.55 million). 37 mins later, turnover hit 1 billion yuan (USD 162.18 million). Last year’s Double 11 promotion realized 19.1 billion yuan (USD 3 billion) Gross Merchandise Volume.
Huge amount of transactions in one day caused much pressure on retailers and logistics. Customer service in reataiers which joined the big promotion had been busy for more than a week. Logistic companies had recruited people and increased transportation twos ago. The big promotion created more than 50 million packages to deliver, lots of logistic companies worked overtime for a month.
Tmall just released this year Double 11 sign up and retailers selecting rules on August 10. This year’s Double 11 will be bigger than last year, clothing is still the hot products. Clothing turnover on November 11 2012 was 7 billion yuan(USD 113.5 million), 10% of total turnover of clothing in 2012 and 50% of total turnover on November 11 2012. Besides the biggest promotion, Tmall has launched other promotion plan in 2013, like winter new clothing online.
Tmall promotion strategies for Double 11 includes O2O, mobile devices and social network. The highlights of 2013 Double 11 is to lay emphasis on mobile advertising and promotion. Weatao, a mobile app for Taobao and Tmall shopping, is expected to complete advertising for Double 11 by the end of October 2013.
Last Double 11 generated 9 million transactions (including Tmall and other B2C platforms) on mobile devices through Alipay app, turnover reached 1.2 billion yuan (USD 195 million).