Chinese e-commerce firms have launched a new round of sales promotions for the upcoming December 12, a move analysts said Thursday may fail to bring the companies a transaction volume on par with Singles' Day (November 11).
December 12, or 12-12-2012, was targeted by the retailers in hopes it might echo November 11's success.
Traditional online promotions, including the one held on Singles' Day by tmall.com, a business to consumer (B2C) website affiliated with Alibaba Group, offered online shoppers a 50 percent discount across the board.
But Alibaba has scheduled a new kind of promotion on taobao.com for Wednesday which will not have a single specific discount, instead letting Taobao sellers decide how much to lower their prices.
A sales promotion with uncertain discounts will have trouble attracting attention from shoppers, especially when it comes to Taobao's small-scale sellers who mainly vend products from unestablished brands, Su Huiyan, an industry analyst from iResearch, told the Global Times Thursday, adding that Taobao may therefore look forward to less impressive sales volumes than Tmall did on Singles' Day.
The Singles' Day sales promotion brought Alibaba a total of 19.1 billion yuan ($3.07 billion) in sales volume, with 13.2 billion yuan contributed by Tmall, which mainly sells brand goods by medium- and large-scale sellers.
Some other B2C e-commerce platforms are sticking with traditional sales promotions this December. Dangdang.com launched an online promotion offering a 50 percent discount for all goods between December 4 and December 12.
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