This year's Singles' Day, on November 11, is drawing near again. The day, which is based on the four "1"s in the date of 11/11, has become popular among young Chinese people, whether they are hoping to find love or celebrating their single status. It has also created a lucrative opportunity for online sales promotions.
A large promotion initiated by Taobao in 2009 helped the company reap sales of roughly 100 million yuan ($16 million). Similar offers in 2010 and last year were also hugely successful.
This year, many other B2C companies are also hoping to get in on the act.
Fierce competition
On October 10, B2C website 360buy.com launched a one-month Singles' Day sales campaign, offering coupons to consumers worth 50 million yuan.
Tencent's B2C platform buy.qq.com ran a three-day sales campaign from October 24 to 26, and reported that 5 million orders worth 650 million yuan were made by more than 2 million people.
Suning, Dangdang and Yihaodian have also launched similar promotions.
Tmall, which was spun off from Taobao last year, increased the number of its vendors participating in the Singles' Day promotion to 10,000 this year from 2,000 in 2011. It also raised its server capacity by two times to ensure network stability and cooperated with nine delivery companies in order to avoid the delays to deliveries that happened last year as a result of the huge surge in orders.
Many vendors, especially those with huge inventories in their offline stores, see the day as the ideal time to cut their stocks and boost revenue.
Beyond Home Textile, the second largest seller on Tmall during the 2011 Singles' Day, with sales worth more than 40 million yuan, has stocked up 300 million yuan worth of goods this year and is hoping to reach sales of 100 million yuan, according to Wu Ronghua, head of the company's e-commerce division.
Landmark building should respect the public's feeling
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