Chinaโs e-commerce giant Alibaba kicked off its annual โSinglesโ Dayโ shopping spreeโChinaโs equivalent of Black Fridayโtoday. This year will mark the first time that Alibabaโs merchants and consumers get a taste of โnew retail,โ a term founder Jack Ma coined to depict the increasingly blurring boundaries between the online and offline shopping worlds.
Started as a 24-hour online sale, Alibabaโs 11.11 Global Shopping Festivalโas it is officially calledโhas evolved into a 24-day festival season to celebrate the countryโs orgy of consumption. The Festival smashed its own record by racking up 120.7 billion RMB (approximately $17.8 billion) in gross merchandise volume (GMV) within 24 hours last year, eclipsing the $2.74 billion generated online during the USโs Black Friday sales in the same year.
That number was projected onto a large screen, live-streamed in real time to millions around the country last year. But Alibaba is seeking something else this time: How many customers itโs able to drive away from their computers to physical retail stores. As such the giant is partnering with 52 shopping malls to set up 60 pop-up stores across 12 cities in China during the Festival, a spokesperson says.
Alibaba is also turning nearly 100,000 stores in 334 cities into the so-called โsmart storesโ where consumers get to try out its facial recognition-powered payment solution, an area being cracked by all of Chinaโs trio of tech giants: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. The stores will also be equipped with the โscan-and-deliver O2O shoppingโ feature, which Alibaba has been trailing with its fullest expression of new retail, the Hema stores. Scan the barcode of an item, pay via Alibabaโs Alipay, and the store will have a shopperโs purchase delivered home.
Other e-commerce players, including Alibabaโs arch-rival JD.com, will also have their own campaigns during the shopping season. JD.com has initiated the 618 Festival, which falls on mid-year and is also joined by other online retailers.
