Special Edition: 11/11
From Singles Day to Shopping Festival
The 11/11 holiday began as “Singles Day” in China, and has quickly become the biggest online shopping holiday in the world.
Last year Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao marketplaces saw $3 billion USD in sales, twice that of America’s Cyber Monday holiday. This year it’s expected to be close to $5 billion.The scale of the holiday is what has people all over the world watching.
Here are 11 things to know about 11/11:
Singles Day was first celebrated on November 11th, 1993 by students at Nanjing University. It began with informal parties, mixers and other group events designed to help singles find a match. As the holiday grew in popularity, it morphed into a day for the unattached to show their pride in being single in a culture that prizes marriage.
The day is called Guānggùn Jié 光棍节 in Chinese or literally “bare branches festival”. A tree branch without leaves symbolizing a single person without a partner makes even hardened Informers like us a bit teary-eyed.
The date of 11/11 was chosen as it looks like four bare branches.
A breakfast option to celebrate Singles’ Day is eating four yóutiáo (deep-fried dough sticks) representing the four “ones” in “11.11" and one bāozi (steamed, stuffed bun) representing the middle dot.
11/11 only became a shopping festival in 2009, as an experiment by Alibaba’s online marketplace Tmall. Steve Wang, VP of Website Operations at Tmall, explains:
“Back in 2009 when Tmall.com was in its infancy, the scale of merchants on the platform was very limited and most of them did not have a clear concept of B2C. They settled on a 24-hour sale where all participating vendors agreed to offer discounts of at least 50%.”
While the idea of Singles Day becoming a shopping festival out of a need for retail therapy seems convenient, it wasn’t the case. It was conceived to fall during the slow sales period between China’s National Day (October 1) and Chinese New Year (usually early February). It was also a date that was incredibly easy to remember.
The first 11.11 shopping festival in 2009 saw just 27 vendors take part. This year over 10,000 vendors are expected to take part, with Western brands like Microsoft, Toys R Us, Adidas, and the Gap all participating.
After last years $3 billion USD, Alibaba expects sales of $4.9 billion USD ins 2013 for its two marketplaces.
In the first 50 minutes of 2013's 11/11 $1 billion USD was spent. An incredible video of Tmall analytics via Tech in Asia’s Steve Millward)
The scale of sales makes a bit more sense when one considers out of China’s 591 million-strong internet population, 271 million have purchased items online.
The logistics of such an undertaking are not without hiccups. Last year, payment-system failures and delivery problems plagued the onslaught of orders. Pictures circulated on QQ of mountains of packages piling up in Guangzhou. This year, couriers have apparently found an extra 100 planes to handle the nearly 323 million parcels expected to be delivered.
Every item you can imagine is discounted, from BMWs to boyfriend body pillows to a “I’m Single because I’m Fat” hoodie. Amazon.cn announced it would discount over 20,000 products up to 90%. Euromonitor declared “the price competition is thermonuclear”.
2013 is the first year 11/11 sales aren’t restricted to Mainland China. While the Taobao and Tmall sites are Chinese-language only, they are carefully expanding to the diaspora in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
For us ecommerce nerds, the 11/11 Shopping Festival is something to marvel at. But let’s not forget about the millions of singles looking for love in China on this day.
The lingering effects of the One Child Policy and a preference for sons has created a gender imbalance that will result in an estimated 24 million men having significant trouble finding a partner. For women it’s no easier, as there’s even an official term “leftover women” (shèngnǚ 剩女) that stigmatizes those who remain unmarried past the age of 27.
So let’s celebrate all the bare branches out there.
The following story on the origin of Singles Day is completely unverified. Here it is anyways:
An old story goes that once there were four single men, leading very boring lives. None of them were married, or had lovers, or did anything exciting. They just sat around all day and played Mahjong.
One day they played Mahjong from 11 in the morning until 11 at night. During the game, no matter who won, the winning card was always the ‘four columns’ card (the card shows four independent, parallel columns in two lines).
Even more of a coincidence, it was Nov 11, or 11/11. In order to commemorate the day, they nicknamed it Singles Day.
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