Originally dubbed Singles Day by 4 university students, 11.11 has transformed into one of the world’s largest shopping festivals.
In 2009, Alibaba launched the first 11.11 shopping festival, generating RMB 50 million in GMV despite a website crash. Since then, it has grown massively, and today, 11.11 spans several weeks instead of just one day.
But has 11.11 lost its charm? Tune is as we explore why Chinese platforms stopped reporting GMV, how the festival’s expansion impacts consumer behavior, and whether the rise of frequent sales like 7.7 and 12.12 has led to “sale fatigue.”
Are shopping festivals still relevant, or have they lost their significance in today’s competitive ecommerce landscape?
P.S. Did you know Taylor Swift kicked off Alibaba’s 24-hour 11.11 shopping event in 2019?
Watch the episode here:
Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Jianggan: [00:00:00] Today,
Sabrina: we are going to talk about four single men and how they started a holiday that eventually became a very, very big shopping festival.
Sabrina: So today we’re talking about 1111. And before we start, we’re going to talk a little bit about the history of 1111, right? So how did 1111 actually start? Because when we were asking around, most people assumed that the e commerce companies were the ones who started 1111. Because obviously 1111 is a very big shopping festival.
Sabrina: Not just in China, but in the rest of Southeast Asia as well. Interesting fact, 11. 11 actually started in 1993 by four single students in Nanjing University. So we will have a photo of the dorm here, if Jianggang can find it later, where they were probably sitting and discussing this single’s day.
Jianggan: It was kind of interesting. 1993 was think, I think a few years after the reform and opening up and people go to universities, they have a sense of unease about the future, but they know that the future will be better.
Jianggan: Yeah. And it’s also the first time that people started looking at, I [00:01:00] mean, solve the new technologies. I think Nigerian university was I think back then ranked number three in China. My high school classmates, 43 of them, 12 of them, 12 of them ended up in this university.
Sabrina: There were any of them, the four single men,
Jianggan: one
Sabrina: of the four single men.
Jianggan: Much younger than that. But but, but I’ve been interested to learn. So it was very, very interesting. First, it’s very hot in summer. There was once I was there shortly after the summer holiday, it was 38 degrees. So, first, think about that. I mean, like young students, it was hot. What do you do?
Jianggan: This was before the computer games.
Sabrina: You dream.
Jianggan: You end up spending lots of time chatting because you can’t sleep. Oh.
Sabrina: So that’s probably how the idea of this came about, right? So they were having a discussion and then they kind of decided that 11 11, singles day, should be a day to celebrate being single, right?
Sabrina: And it became kind of like a move, small movement in the school. Felix, can you go to the slide three? They have like [00:02:00] posters about it.
Jianggan: they threw lots of posters from the Cultural Revolution era. I mean, celebrating the proletariat or whatever. But they replaced the proletariat, the workers, with the single men. And this poster particularly says that 11 11 the singles are invisible.
Sabrina: So it was really create that just to celebrate singlehood, right?
Jianggan: They actually made lots of very interesting analogies so 11 is not only single. And I think back then, I think when I was at Western University once, they said, okay I’m going to the town because the university just created a campus, which is.
Jianggan: across the Yangtze River from the main city center. And of course there’s nothing to do there. So one person was telling me, oh, I’m going to town tomorrow. I said, okay, how do you go there? He said I’m going to cross the bridge. Then I’m going to take the bus number 11.
Jianggan: He’s like, what is bus number 11? I’m going to walk. Oh, okay. I feel like that joke still exists in space.
Sabrina: Like [00:03:00] I’ve heard it back from like
Jianggan: No, I think nowadays it has become more difficult. I think over the years, when the internet came about, all this, I think W11 was the single thing that was created before the internet, but when the internet came, this is where people who obviously had nothing else to do in university, they started creating all these posters, all these memes and stuff.
Jianggan: And things caught fire. It just became something that everyone knew about. I think Alibaba and the e commerce platforms, they look at it, they said, okay, that’s a perfect opportunity for us to do something about it. Yeah.
Sabrina: We were at the Alibaba campus like two weeks ago. And so we were watching a video about Alibaba’s right.
Sabrina: Which was in 2009. And someone asked us like, what’s one of the founders single, which is why he decided to hold a sale on like 1111 itself. I
Jianggan: don’t know,
Sabrina: So it’s interesting, right? Cause it started as sort of like unofficial holiday, but now it’s, it’s kind of very strongly associated with e [00:04:00] commerce platforms.
Sabrina: Most people, I would say, don’t know that 11, 11 is something outside of e commerce platforms. They just think it’s a date that e commerce platforms have created. Right.
Jianggan: So there’s a saying that e commerce successively hijacked a celebration of the singles and created something that That’s something first of all, which is, I mean, maybe we should say that that is actually for women because most of the pioneers are women.
Sabrina: That’s right. But a good way to celebrate singlehood is to spend money on yourself. Retail therapy. So actually the 1111 sales could be celebrating singlehood as well. Yeah. Because single people have nothing to spend money on except themselves. So you can go shopping. Sure. So we
Jianggan: talked
Sabrina: about how Alibaba’s first ever single sales was 2009.
Sabrina: That’s like 15 years ago, right? And back then, so we were watching the video at the Alibaba campus. They had this whole kind of like short video on how 11. 11 started, the whole process behind it. It was quite interesting. They had about only 27 brands who [00:05:00] joined this. And I think they have a picture of the Alibaba team in the office on the day itself.
Jianggan: What time was it?
Sabrina: 1111 20:00 PM
Jianggan: That’s pm, right? Yeah.
Sabrina: I’m assuming this is pm. So basically
Jianggan: that’s third all the way until almost midnight, and that’s when they hit a record
Sabrina: 50 million.
Jianggan: Yeah. And that was handwritten.
Jianggan: In the beginning, I think you saw the video and you heard the stories from some of the earlier guys that I think initially was red cap. It was scrappy, right? And I think you mentioned
Sabrina: their website like crashed in the first few hours of the first ever 11. 11 just because I think the volume that they were getting was so unexpected.
Sabrina: Like the traffic was way too high compared to what they were expecting, right?
Jianggan: Yeah. So,
Sabrina: and then of course, over 15 years, the 1111 we see now is very, very different.
Jianggan: It’s very different. they stopped doing the, the gala I think over the last two years. But when it was still doing that, there was a very elaborate show.
Jianggan: I think right before the pandemic or during the first one or two years of the pandemic, it was very [00:06:00] elaborate gala. I think for this we can pull that photo of, you know, the digital numbers and instead of having something handwritten at the end of the race. Okay. In the first five seconds or first five minutes, this is how
Sabrina: much
Jianggan: yeah.
Jianggan: And that’s what a 15, 50, 000,
Sabrina: 15 million,
Jianggan: 15 million. Oh, that’s a lot. Okay.
Sabrina: 15 million. Yeah.
Jianggan: I think now it’s in a, in a thousands of billions. Yeah. So of course things have evolved a lot and you mentioned that during the first iteration, the server broke, right? Yes.
Sabrina: The server crashed. But I think it’s just because they weren’t expecting that amount of test and volume.
Jianggan: Yeah.
Sabrina: But of course, I do think 11. 11 is kind of a way for them to now, I guess it’s kind of a way for them to test new systems as well.
Jianggan: I mean, it has been that over the years, actually. The servers were not the only things which broke during the first few iterations of W11. The payment also broke.
Jianggan: Logistics, I mean,
Sabrina: Logistics probably couldn’t keep up.
Jianggan: Yeah, your warehouse will be [00:07:00] overwhelmed. I mean, so many orders are coming. So many parcels are coming. How can I cope with that? Then that was causing delays. And of course in some other companies, people might come to the conclusion of saying that, okay, this is not feasible.
Jianggan: Let’s scale down. But I think the whole ecosystem came together to actually resolve all these problems. Actually, I mean, there are lots of sort of theories about why Alipay was created. Actually, 1 of the reasons was doing, I mean, of course, there’s a trust that escrow and everything. But 1 reason is that when.
Jianggan: You rely on 3rd party payment systems, and sometimes you will process, like, thousands. Orders every 2nd, what happens? Because we use a 3rd party payment system. You need to send a signal. You need to get the other party to approve and the other party will break. This is when I said, okay, why don’t we just just just have all the payments in our.
Jianggan: On ecosystem, so that, okay, whenever the consumer makes a payment, it’s basically deducting a number from their. [00:08:00] Balance and put that into the. The merchant’s balance and they, I mean, like seven days, whatever they, you pay the money off to the merchant. So, so you bypass the dependency on third parties.
Jianggan: And then that became something scalable.
Sabrina: It also probably makes it easier for you to fix, right? Because if obviously your own payment can’t handle that volume, you can fix it yourself. You can’t go to your third party player and be like, please fix it. There’s only this one day of a year where I suddenly have a lot of traffic and I need you to be able to like deal with this volume.
Sabrina: Okay. Cool.
Jianggan: I think the Chinese players were already better in the sense that they were always being in standby. Imagine yourself, say, somebody would come from this way, have a problem, they ask you to send an email.
Sabrina: I’m out of working hours, don’t bother me.
Jianggan: But I
Sabrina: think 11. 11 isn’t just a test for these e commerce platforms themselves, right?
Sabrina: So traditionally 11. 11, as well as the mid year 18 June sale, shopping festival, 618. That was
Jianggan: the birthday of JD allegedly.
Sabrina: Yeah, 618, Sales not used to serve as sort of a key barometer for consumer [00:09:00] confidence in China So people will look at like the gmv that these companies were reporting to see how much consumers were willing to spend But that seems to be changing over the recent few years, right?
Sabrina: So janggan, you wrote a commentary on cna which will be linked in the show notes below
Jianggan: It’s called
Sabrina: what 11 11 single days sales no longer says about china’s economy And why do you think this is the case? So like why have people? Essentially, we haven’t mentioned this, but companies have sort of reporting their GMV over the past two, three years.
Sabrina: Now they sort of report more vague metrics, right? So like Taobao just reported, Oh we had growth in GMV record number, active buyers,
Jianggan: JD
Sabrina: reported, Oh, 20 percent increase in number of shoppers compared to last year. Why have these platforms kind of stopped reporting GMV and why do these sales no longer serve as sort of a barometer for consumer confidence?
Jianggan: I think when something which is growing fast and Jeremy serves as this like top line figure, which excites people, different, [00:10:00] different parts of the ecosystem. But as the growth is no longer as fast as it used to be, the purpose of this or the usefulness of this to to excite and encourage the whole ecosystems kind of diminishes.
Jianggan: There was some skepticism about GM v Philippi Philippi. If you can go to that page about gmv. So people are saying that, okay what, what do count as gmv?
Jianggan: Because I mean you say that, okay, it’s the number of the total amount of sales report, right? But what does that mean? If you look at this chart, there are so many different ways and different, different layers. Does it mean that, okay, I have made order with this amount?
Jianggan: Does that mean that I have paid for this as a consumer? Does that mean that, okay, the order has been dispatched? So it’s complex.
Jianggan: And there’s something of questioning that. Which I think back then we put forward arguments saying that I mean, there’s no need to do that because it’s just a macro number, which is used to encourage and motivate the whole ecosystem. But of course, now we are in a situation where. The economy was not [00:11:00] growing as big.
Jianggan: Oh, as fast as it used to be. I mean, even if the competence of our economy is still good you might not be as excited as before with the single sales effect, because a couple of factors one of the factors is actually Pinduoduo, because Pinduoduo started this low price throughout the year.
Sabrina: So then you don’t really have to wait for sales.
Jianggan: That diminishes the appeal. of the shopping festival or put it in other words, that makes it a higher hurdle for brands, sellers and the participants of the sale to, to offer something even more aggressive to consumers to make it stand out.
Sabrina: That’s another thing that we’ll talk about. So obviously when 11. 11 started, it was just a one day event, right? It’s kind of like a big event for a lot of companies because obviously everybody is preparing there’s a lot of this like excitement for just this one day sale.
Sabrina: But now we’ve seen that 11. 11 has kind of Shifted. It’s no longer just on 11, 11, it’s now stretches out over like a month. Right. And [00:12:00] this is something we discussed in our a hundred episode about the 150 billion parcels. So we were looking at the peak daily parcel volume in China and the peak this year was the 22nd of October it’s just some random Tuesday and. But you said that it’s likely because the 11. 11 sales had already started.
Jianggan: If you look at this slide, you see the difference between the peak volume and average volume. So it’s obviously up, but it’s not up by too much. So we visited quite a number of logistic companies.
Sabrina: I think that obviously stretching 11. 11 up over a couple of weeks kind of takes the load off, not just logistic players. Of course, logistic players because we’ve seen the amount of parcels at literally the mountain of parcels and the parcel slide. And
Jianggan: it’s a difference that the same sorting center were there in, I think, mid, mid October, mid October at the height of W11.
Jianggan: I look at the mountains of And we go back there like six weeks later and towards the beginning of December. You see, okay. People still
Sabrina: a lot, but it’s not like a mountain.
Jianggan: Yeah. People tell you [00:13:00] that. Okay. Now we, now it’s like, but it’s crazy. Lots of puzzles there, but he was like, okay, this is a low period that we can afford to shut down one facility.
Sabrina: So Black Friday is. Another big shopping festival, more in the U S and Europe, right?
Sabrina: So black Friday also used to be a single day sale where people would queue outside stores at night, just to go in and buy stuff at like midnight or 1, 2 AM. But now that they’ve kind of extended to last over one, two weeks, doesn’t that kind of minimize the consumers impulsiveness to spend? I
Jianggan: think now they have much more tools to get consumers to spend.
Jianggan: Right, for the whole live commerce thing and the video commerce and I mean basically there are many more tools for you to, to get consumers to spend on in-house. And many of these tools can be used throughout the year.
Sabrina: So they don’t have the wait for like, just a big sale.
Jianggan: Again, back to the point that, that the hurdle rate you creating something attractive for consumers on a single day is much higher. And and also, I [00:14:00] mean, you speak with people in the ecosystem, they tell you that, okay, should we spend, like, so much time preparing for W 11. And the amount of stress that if it’s just 1 day.
Jianggan: In the past, we mentioned about every time you. Sort of tested the system so that at the next year, the system is able to have a much bigger volume. But no, I think that purpose is so diminished, right?
Sabrina: Yes, because most viewers, most shoppers are probably like scrolling through the app throughout the whole week instead of just that single day itself. But then also I feel that now there’s not just 11, 11. So obviously there are so many other, like. random dates of sales now, right? So there’s like posters.
Sabrina: So Shopee has like 667788. Lazada has like a March birthday sale. Troff Troff is a thing on not just like Shopee and Lazada, but also on, I think Alibaba has Troff Troff sales as well.
Jianggan: Yeah, Troff Troff is I think it’s something that the commerce platforms in China do, but in South East Asia, particularly, I think Shopee essentially did it like every month, right?
Sabrina: But the thing is, sometimes I’ll scroll like [00:15:00] before the sale and then I’ll like the product, right? And then during the sale, I’ll go back and look at it and it’s the same price. So they mark up the price and then they give you a 20 percent discount to make you feel like there’s a sale. So with like the increase in number of sales, and obviously now with e commerce, it’s so easy to check the prices.
Sabrina: You know, when something is actually cheaper. Yes.
Jianggan: I was the, the live stream on doing where the host spends like, like, you know, a few minutes explaining exactly how the price is like, then I go to Pinduoduo and realize the price 30 percent cheaper.
Jianggan: Now I place my order there. Because now everybody pretty much has every platform and competition in many aspects have become sort of quite hard to differentiate. I mean, the logistics speed, the selection, et cetera. So price becomes a differentiator and the ability to squeeze on efficiency.
Jianggan: I mean, it sounds easy, but it actually is not that easy for some people And back to southeast asia per se. I do think there was a reason why shopee created all this like monthly sell festivals, because I think in [00:16:00] terms of the infrastructure in terms of the availability of sellers and assortment of goods You don’t have the same level as you would have in China.
Jianggan: So, which means that if you, if you just rely on W11, you are not going to, I mean, at the stage where the commerce is still growing, right? You are not able to create this huge search because I mean, what you can put forward is limited and what it can fulfill is limited. I think even until like last year and stuff, they still rely heavily on third party payment system.
Jianggan: So. So, so there’s limited you can, you can do, and and if your, your objective is, is to keep growing you try to sort of create more of these smaller peaks rather than having one big peak that you know the ecosystem is not able to handle.
Sabrina: Oh, but like, if you’re a consumer and you know that every single month that’s going to be a sale.
Sabrina: What would make you want to spend like, let’s say in a certain month, because I’m assuming most of the sales are actually the same throughout the year.
Jianggan: I think, I think that depends on the platforms to do that.
Jianggan: And the platform [00:17:00] wants to create a competition of different brands coming to the platform to offer the best discounts, but you know, the brands in the market. So, so it’s, it’s, it’s, I mean, compared to. To the always cynical, always sort of not cynical, but always on a tool brands in China because they face very fierce competition.
Jianggan: The competition here is not as fierce. So from an e commerce platform point of view, to convince the brands to give very steep discounts is probably much harder here compared to in China.
Sabrina: Did I get very steep discounts?
Jianggan: I think one of the key reasons the whole live commerce thing took off is is, the top live hosts in Kabul early days Li Jiaqi and Bavia, they were able to negotiate very steep discounts and a lot of freebies for their followers.
Jianggan: And and that was a key reason why it took off.
Sabrina: Oh, cause the, they had the actual brands, but it was a much lower price,
Jianggan: much lower price. I’m established international brands and offering goods at a much lower price.
Sabrina: So what is this kind of like, I wouldn’t say shift, [00:18:00] but what does this mean for e commerce and retailers?
Sabrina: So obviously 11, 11 or black Friday, these single day sales used to be a very big thing, right? Consumers would get very excited and then they would want to come and buy. But now I would say the excitement on the day itself has kind of diminished because Consumers can look over like one, two weeks, but like you said, right, they can always look at other platforms.
Sabrina: What does this mean for like e commerce platforms or retailers in terms of finding better ways instead of sales of engaging with customers?
Jianggan: No, I think at the end of the day, it’s always an interesting sort of balance and a game between platforms, the marketplaces, as well as the producers, the brands and stuff. I think the last few years at least what do you see in China is that soft offline retailers have been performing very well.
Jianggan: , so you have, Audi and Sam’s Club doing very well and they’re doing very well on sort of e commerce as well. I think this year’s Sam’s Club’s sales in China, half of that came from e commerce platform.
Jianggan: So you will see that when an infrastructure is highly developed and and people are [00:19:00] competing different things there. So, and also customers are segmented, right? Sam’s Club will appeal to people who are relatively sort of middle class above a bit affluent. They look at all, all the choices and they say, okay, I’m not tired of all these choices.
Jianggan: Can you pick a few things for me and know that you sort of helped me get the best deal in this particular category, best like this product. I mean, in a way it’s the same what Costco is doing in the us. Yes. So, so then of course, on the other hand, there’s still the mass consumers who are looking for unbranded.
Jianggan: Good, good, cheap price. So this is what Pinduoduo has been doing very well.
Sabrina: So these are, so I guess there’s still a way for retailers to kind of compete with e commerce platforms.
Jianggan: It is, it is, but I think at the end of the day, it’s something which becomes a little bit more nuanced in a sense that you can’t depend on one tactic for everyone.
Jianggan: That, I mean, you have to target specific segments of consumers with specific offerings. I think e commerce platforms are trying to differentiate as well.
Sabrina: So I think that’s all for today’s episode. Thank you guys for [00:20:00] tuning in. If you like this week’s episode, do like and subscribe, as well as share our YouTube video with your friends if you enjoyed it.
Sabrina: And Merry Christmas, cause this episode is going to go out before Christmas. And happy holidays. Bye bye.
Jianggan: Bye
