You may know Jim as our Funny Camp Director. He also serves as our Chinese Correspondent. He wants to bring to your attention the Chinese holiday Single Men’s Day, aka Double 11. –Editor Chloe Sweeney
–by Jim Wang
In China, November 11th is Single Men’s Day. It was derived from Valentine’s Day in the 1990’s. However, people didn’t acknowledge this day until it became a part of the worldwide marketing campaign called Double 11. In China, this campaign transformed November 11th into a huge commercial holiday. November 11th morphed into a Black Friday.
The sales on November 11th in China are equivalent with Black Friday in America. Alibaba (a Chinese e-commerce company similar to Amazon) sold products worth 1.2 billion dollars in only three minutes this year. The total amount of sales increased to 15 billion dollars in 24 hours. The sales on Double 11 are three times greater than those on Black Friday. An interesting fact is 70% of the transactions were completed on mobile devices.
There were over six million kinds of products placed on sale on November 11th last year. This year, consumers can purchase sale items from over forty thousand merchants and thirty thousand brands.
Distributing all these products purchased on line is a huge task for any company. According to Alibaba, their cooperative partners will make 1.7 million deliveries, use forty thousand delivery cars, and five thousand warehouses to deal with the massive number of purchases.
Double 11 has become such an event, “President” Frank Underwood (aka Kevin Spacey) speaks to it in the video below.
Have fun shopping!!!
