5 things to learn from Single Day 2016

From around $7 million sales, with 27 merchants took part the first Single Day in 2009 to $17.8 billion sales, with merchants from more than 200 countries in 2016, this huge progress of Single Day sales on Alibaba platform indicated the fast growing digital industry in China. (Details and brief history can be found in here!)

However, apart from the sales record, there are some other interesting aspects of Single Day 2016 being worth to explore.

• M-commerce is getting more popular and dominant. — According to the data, up to 82% of all transactions in Tmall during Single Day sales were made by mobile devices this year, rising from around 70% in 2015. JD.com (China second largest E-commerce giant) also marked approximately 85% of all its orders made via smart devices.
• Customers are getting calmer and more sensible. — The market growth rate this year was 32%, which was almost half less than last year. Customers have more choices and become more sensible while choosing the products. Since more merchants participate in this game, how to stand out from the crowds is the key, especially for the new-present foreign brands, effective strategies of campaigns, product display, shipping, etc are more important than just a “Huge discount”.
• More Social media engagements. — This year, the E-commerce giants put more efforts on the social media engagements, trying to keep the customers online. Almost all the trending commercial tools were involved, from Pre-sale gala with famous KOLs, VR shopping experience to voucher deliveries.
• Beauty, clothing and home categories were very popular, but mainly fast fashion. – Top sales brands are also well presented offline in China. Although shopping online is becoming more popular in Chinese daily life, the presences of physical store are still important. It is a good way for brands to show their DNA, and build connections with customers. However, as for the luxury industry, this needs another twist.
• Shipping, after-sales service…Time to see the feedback from customers. — After all these crazy transactions, the real challenges just began, for example, how to make sure these billions of orders can be send on time, and how to guarantee the after-sales service etc. Among these years, Single Day season is also the peak season of complaints. Merchants made promises to solve the problems every year, but what are the improvements this year? We’ will see soon.

Nowadays, Single day has become the most important shopping festival in China, and starting to be more international as well. It is definitely a good opportunity for brands to draw attentions and boost sales. However, since its growth is really fast, to be or not to be part of it, and how to play with it, really need a deep second thought.

Besides, I won’t tell you in addition to “Double 11”, there are Black Friday, Cyber Monday, “Double 12” waiting for you.