Online Shopping Frenzy

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba creates a startling sales  record on this year’s Singles’ Day, tapping into the rising consumerism of the upper middle class. The surge may not yield the home market growth needed to rebalance the country’s growth.

- C.P.Chandrasekhar

IN an otherwise gloomy world economic environment, a new kind of record has given the media a bizarre cause to cheer: the value of online sales notched up by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on a single discounts sales day. Global business headlines screamed that in its annual discount sale on Singles’ Day, November 11, 2017, Alibaba registered a record sales value of 168.2 billion yuan or $25.3 billion. Singles’ Day, or November 11, was because of its 11/11 aspect, reportedly chosen around 25 years ago by students of Nanjing University to celebrate the fact of being single.

Using what has evolved to become a hugely popular and secular celebration, in 2009 Alibaba decided to turn the day into a grand discount sales day like Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving in November) in the United States, and tap into the rising consumerism of a well-to-do middle class. In the process, the annual celebrations in China on November 11 have gone the way they have for most of the festivals in today’s neoliberal world. Besides eating and drinking, people shop to celebrate.

Alibaba promotes the sales on the day with the tag “Double 11” in Chinese. The immediate success of the strategy encouraged the firm to pre-empt competition by applying for, and winning in 2012, the trademark for promotions branded “Double 11”. That meant that other e-retailers like JD.com, who had also been using the term, were henceforth barred from using the tag. In fact, in 2014, Alibaba threatened legal action against those (mis+)using the Double 11 brand.