The "Single's day" is coming in China

China is gearing up for its annual Single’s Day on November 11, a day that is marked with a nationwide shopping frenzy, as online vendors launch massive discounts, extending up to 70% in many cases.

Last year, Single’s Day promotional sales on Tmall.com, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, were estimated at a whopping 35 billion yuan (approx. $5.7 billion).

Many analysts expect that this year’s sales figures could surpass that number and touch 50 billion yuan (approx. $8.2 billion).

However, there is one concern that is looming large. Last year, although vendors ended up raking in the big bucks, customers were left complaining due to delays in the delivery of their orders.

In many cases, the shipments were delayed by nearly 15-20 days. And that experience has led people to question that if the orders this year are likely to increase, can delivery companies cope with the additional pressure?

In fact, China’s State Post Bureau has predicted that the delivery services could possibly need to handle more than 500 million packages from November 11 to 16 this year. That is a 50% increase from last year.

In order to tackle that volume of shipments, these companies have already begun recruiting more people. However, it remains to be seen as to whether they will be able to improve upon last year’s performance.

The Single’s Day tradition began in China recently, as an antithesis to Valentine’s Day in many ways.

It was a day for celebration for all those who are neither married nor dating anyone.

However, it evolved into an online shopping extravaganza from 2009 onwards, after e-commerce giants Tmall.com and JD.com began using the day to offer massive discounts to online shoppers.

Source: CCTV News