11.11 Global Shopping Festival Breaks E-Commerce Records

Alibaba’s 11.11 sales topped $38.4 billion on 11 November 2019, an increase of 26% from 2018. This makes it the biggest e-commerce event ever — bigger than the $24.2 billion online sales made between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday in the US last year.

What started 11 years ago as an attempt to encourage online shopping in the quiet period between Golden Week in China and Christmas has now gone global. The top five countries selling into China via Alibaba platforms were Japan, United States, South Korea, Australia and Germany, according to the Alibaba Group.

Global brands, such as Apple, Bose, Estée Lauder, GAP, H&M, L’Oréal, Nike, were among the nearly 300 whose sales surpassed RMB100 million ($14.3 million) this year.

Forward-thinking retailers are realising the reach of 11.11. For example, the cosmetics brand MAC sold 60,000 units of a limited-edition lipstick in five minutes of pre-sales. Yet to appeal to international customers and close sales, retailers have to make it easy for customers to check out and pay.

Frequently this means offering familiar local payment methods.

That’s iDEAL for the Dutch, P24 for the Poles, Bancontact for the Belgians and so on. PPRO has been a strategic local payments partner of Alipay, the payment service provider for the Alibaba Group, since 2015. We help make it easy for customers outside China to pay in ways they know and trust on Alibaba Group websites. Therefore, we were heavily involved again in the biggest Global Shopping Festival of the year.

This year we found that there were three times as many transactions as we could have seen in the last few years. We also saw that Polish customers were most active. Polish marketing campaigns obviously have made a major impact. What we could also see is that last year day two got off a much higher start than this year. A reason for that could be the fact that the willingness to buy one day one was already quite high. Another reason could be that this year day two was a Tuesday, last year the whole shopping festival started on a Sunday and day two was a Monday therefore.

If you’d like to add 11.11 to your 2020 marketing calendar. Or want to know more about how local payments help close global sales, e-mail relationship@ppro.com

[1] Adobe press release, 26 November 2018, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181126005829/en/Adobe-Analytics-Data-Shows-Cyber-Monday-Broke

[2] Alibaba Group Generated RMB268.4 Billion (US$38.4 Billion) of GMV during the 2019 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/article?news=p191112