Last week, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba kicked off its festival for the annual shopping event that’s widely known as Singles’ Day. Singles’ Day takes place on November 11 and Alibaba is hoping that its new retail strategy will help make this year’s event the largest ever in terms of scale and reach.
Singles’ Day has been compared to Black Friday in the United States. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang created the event ten years ago. When it started, Singles’ Day brought in $7.8 million in gross merchandise value (GMV) and in 2017, total GMV generated reached $25.3 billion. In comparison, online sales for Black Friday totaled $5 billion in the US, according to data from Adobe.
Combining its core e-commerce sites Tmall and Taobao with physical stores, logistics, food delivery and more is the strategy Alibaba is looking to employ.
“Over the last two years, we have pioneered the concept of New Retail to accelerate the digital transformation of the offline,” said CEO Zhang in a statement.
“We are excited by the impressive results achieved to date and will continue to be the driving force innovating for merchants and customers in the coming decades,” added Zhang.
For the first time, Lazada, a Singapore-based e-commerce site that has operations across Southeast Asia, will host sales as part of Singles’ Day, to potentially reach customers across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam during the sales event. Meanwhile, Alibaba and Starbucks struck a deal to work together in China, where Ele.me, Alibaba’s food delivery platform, will provide delivery services for select Starbucks stores across 11 Chinese cities.
Alibaba is anticipating that its multi-country, multi-platform approach to Singles’ Day will help it beat the event’s previous sales record. Only time will tell.
What marketing strategy will you be adopting for Singles’ Day? Let us know in the comments below.