China’s “Black Friday Carnival” is going global during the pandemic

On October 20th, Chinese netizens waited all night to start online shopping for the Double 11 shopping carnival warm-up events (abbreviated as double 11). This online promotional event, founded by Alibaba in 2009, has now become the biggest shopping carnival in China every year. In 2019, Double 11 shopping carnival sales exceeded 1 billion yuan in 19 seconds. Full-day sales reached 268.4 billion yuan. And what is different about this year’s Double 11 Shopping Carnival?

Alibaba Taobao Tmall President Jiang Fan said that this year’s Tmall Double 11 global carnival season will be changed from one day to four days. Two waves of sales will be launched. The first phase of sales will be advanced to November 1-3, and the second wave of sales. It is on November 11th. 

The four-day shopping carnival can significantly increase the overall sales of Double 11 this year. Of course, the capital market and shareholders will also review its performance. After all, it is almost the end of the year, and the stock price also needs to usher in a new wave of growth.

From a global perspective, Amazon and Walmart have extended their year-end promotions this year. Why did Tmall make such a change? Jiang Fan explained that first, he hopes that more consumers can participate and provide consumers with a better experience in terms of choice and logistics. Secondly, the new sales rhythm can help Merchants bring more opportunities.

This year, on Double 11, Alipay will join Double 11 as a digital life platform for the first time. In addition to online, dining, movie tickets, performances, and travel will also open the “City Life Carnival”, creating a 1-hour life circle in 200+ cities. It is worth noting that Jiang Fan said that this year’s Tmall Double 11 will carry out new explorations in the two major scenarios of buying a car and buying a house. According to reports, 50+ mainstream car brands and hot-selling models will be launched, with 7000+ dealers participating. Tmall Haofang has prepared 3000+ real estates to cover 40% of real estates in mainstream cities across the country, with a maximum discount of 1 million for single suites.

Overall, this year’s Tmall Double 11 will bring together 14 million products, an increase of 40% compared to last year’s Double 11. 5000+ new brands and 2,000 industrial belts will participate in Double 11 for the first time, and 800 million consumers are expected to participate.

Targeting global cross-border e-commerce

On Tmall Double 11 this year, AliExpress and Alibaba Damo Academy launched an AI real-time translation live broadcast, which can translate from Chinese to English, Russian, and Spanish at the same time. It is reported that this is the world’s first e-commerce live broadcast to enable AI real-time translation. Chinese businesses can simultaneously cover more than one billion people in the English, Spanish, and Russian regions of the world with just one-click launch in Chinese.

According to relevant data, nearly 90% of merchants on the AliExpress platform are from China, and 82% of them gave up cross-border live broadcasting due to language difficulties. But this year, AliExpress and Alibaba Damo Academy launched a live broadcast that supports multilingual real-time translation, escorting millions of small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in this year’s Tmall Double 11 global carnival season. During the “Black Friday” period, AliExpress will also launch live real-time translation from English to Russian, Spanish, and French, and realize real-time translation in 18 languages in the live comment area, allowing global users to overcome language barriers and participate in live broadcast interactive

How about Southeast Asia?

In Southeast Asian countries, with the exception of Indonesia and the Philippines, the epidemics in most other countries have been brought under certain control. The epidemic has also greatly promoted the digitization process in Southeast Asia. The two eCommerce giants in Southeast Asia are also about to compete in this shopping carnival.

On Double 11 in 2019, Shopee sold 70 million items on the whole day. Chinese cross-border sellers once again led the market. The number of orders during the Double 11 promotion surged to 9 times that of normal. Makeup, skincare, women’s clothing, and home furnishing are the top five cross-border hot selling categories. Shopee’s global spokesperson Cristiano Ronaldo brought amazing traffic, and male users on Double 11 increased by nearly 60% compared to 2018.

On October 22, Shopee officially announced that the 11.11 promotion has officially kicked off.

And the old friend comes again, Gurmit Singh, who was an instant hit as the ambassador of the Shopee 9.9 shopping festival.

Shopee officials are also constantly releasing information about big promotions. For example, Brazil site peak season welfare activities-the entire peak season is 0 yuan free shipping, buyers can enjoy the entire peak season 0 yuan shipping, and cross-border sellers do not need to pay any fees. Enjoying this rare traffic benefit has brought huge orders to their stores. A good product category can bring more traffic, and the platform’s support for a certain category during the big promotion period is enough to bring more traffic support to the seller

On October 15th, Lazada Group, Alibaba’s flagship e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, announced cooperation with South Korean artist Lee Min Ho. Lee Min Ho has officially become Lazada’s first regional brand ambassador. This move may help Lazada achieve a new wave of growth on Double 11 this year.

At this time, on the eve of Double 11, Lazada invited South Korean star Lee Min Ho to serve as the regional brand ambassador, undoubtedly wanting to use celebrity power to expand brand awareness and boost new growth in Double 11.

It is very common for e-commerce players to hire foreign stars as ambassadors, especially in Southeast Asia where Japan and South Korea have a relatively large cultural influence in recent years. E-commerce players in the region often use it as part of the marketing battle.

The commercial shows the collaboration between Lee Min Ho and Lazada brand ambassadors from 6 brands in Southeast Asia and 5 countries, including Agnez Monika and Verrel Bramasta from Indonesia, Ayda Jebat from Malaysia, Kathryn Bernardo from the Philippines, Bella Ranee Campen from Thailand, and Chi Pu from Vietnam.

On the one hand, this cooperation is using the influence of various brands to create momentum, and on the other hand, it wants to convey happiness and the brand values through the image of celebrities,  the traffic will also give the brand new growth.

This year’s “Double 11” Lazada will implement a variety of social fission and introduce new gameplay. Lazada hopes to make this year’s “Double 11” a one-month shopping carnival. “Double 11” to “Double 12” are divided into three stages of activities, and different strategies for different countries will be formulated. The investment this year is expected to be twice that of last year, and the goal is to increase daily sales by 20 times compared with last year.

For some e-commerce companies around the world, the epidemic is like a test. After a series of layoffs and strategic adjustments, the upcoming Double Eleven shopping carnival is the time for them to hand in their answers.