China’s e-commerce giant JD.com will begin its “Double 11” event with in-stock sales at 8 p.m. on the 9th, even earlier than in previous years. This means this year’s Double 11 promotional period is extended by 5 days compared to last year, stretching to 37 days and breaking last year’s record to become the longest “Double 11” in history.
Analysts believe that the highlights this year are the two major trends of international expansion and instant retail, possibly ushering in the biggest wave of transformation in the past decade.
Douyin has combined its Double 11 and Mid-Autumn promotions, allowing merchants who sign up for the Mid-Autumn promotion to instantly join “Double 11” with one click starting on the 9th. Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, however, will start pre-sales on the 15th as they did last year, thus launching later than the others.
This year marks the 17th anniversary of China’s Double 11 shopping festival. While the event is still in the preparation phase and platforms have yet to announce specific rules, some preliminary observations about each platform’s strategy can be made: JD.com is responding with a 37-day long campaign arranged in 5 phases and is targeting large-sum consumer subsidies; Taobao/Tmall are sticking with a two-wave model of in-stock and pre-sale to deepen user engagement; Pinduoduo is entering the fray with 10 billion RMB in subsidies and team purchase schemes.
According to a report from Shanghai’s The Paper, Taotian Group will be going fully global for the first time during this year’s Double 11. Taobao will allocate 1 billion yuan (RM592 million) in marketing subsidies to overseas markets, aiming to help 100,000 merchants double their Double 11 overseas transactions. There will also be “zero-threshold free shipping” piloted in Hong Kong and Macau, and large shipping vouchers for markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia. Additionally, Taobao’s overseas push will launch a “free shipping + free returns” combination in 12 major markets to lower the barrier for overseas customers to place orders.
Pinduoduo’s US-based platform Temu will also begin warming up on the 9th, uniformly offering 20% and 15% off discount tiers, going head-to-head with America’s traditional “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” sales.
Furthermore, instant retail has also become a key battleground. Industry insiders point out that this year, thousands of Tmall brands are expected to join Taobao’s flash sales. Some speculate that after integrating Tmall and Taobao flash sales, users ordering from official Tmall flagship stores of physical brands can choose either express shipping or takeaway delivery.
On the gradually lengthening Double 11 cycle, Zhang Yuchen, executive deputy secretary-general of the China E-commerce Network Live Streaming & Short Video Committee, analyzes that a longer cycle addresses the practical challenge of declining traffic efficiency. Besides locking in consumption ahead of time, it also spreads out traffic pressure and eases logistics peaks. Currently, the customer acquisition cost on e-commerce platforms is increasing by 35% per year, and traffic costs for small and medium-sized businesses are rising annually. Running Double 11 in phases can effectively increase the frequency of user exposure under the same traffic capacity. The extended Double 11 period can also alleviate logistics pressure, reduce peak costs, and lessen user dissatisfaction with logistics services.