Bargain-hunters are seen shopping at the Macy's Herald Square flagship store in New York, the United States, Nov. 26, 2015. On Thanksgiving at 6pm, most Macy's stores across the country opened its doors to thousands of early bird shoppers in search of sales, door buster deals and limited-time-offers. This year's "Black Friday" falls on Nov. 27, which also marks the traditional start of the U.S. holiday shopping season. [Photo: Xinhua/Li Muzi]

Cross-border e-commerce players are making their mark by promoting Black Friday sales here in China.

Peral Zhu is one of those enjoying "Black Friday" in China.

Zhu says she used to live in the US and she misses "Black Friday," the biggest shopping day of the year in that country.

"I love buying shoes and I used to stock up on them on Black Friday. But after coming back to China, I found that designer shoes in big stores here are too expensive for me. So I didn't buy anything and lost the feeling for Black Friday for a long while.''

But this year, Zhu says she is enjoying overseas Black Friday discounts, even though she is in China for the occasion, thanks to the cross-border e-commerce sites.

"In this past year I've found that some of the promising cross-border e-commerce sites are thriving and they have brought those discounted products in the US close to me."

Zhu adds she is able to buy discounted goods ahead of Nov. 27 - the actual Black Friday - because the cross-border e-commerce sites began their sales about a week ago.

This is the first time major players like Amazon and the Chinese overseas shopping site ymatou.com have run the shopping festival for as long as a week or more.

Zeng Bibo, the CEO of ymatou.com, says the company is extending the shopping festival because of the huge demand in China.

"We already found that Chinese consumers who are used to shopping at home showed great enthusiasm for overseas products during our Black Friday campaign last year. But we were under-prepared then, as we didn't have a good supply of many goods and the service system didn't provide enough support."

This year, the company made early preparations.

"Black Friday or Thanksgiving sales in other countries all start a week earlier for the shops' VIP customers. So if you go shopping on the actual day, there won't be anything good left. This year, our professional buyers started stocking up two weeks ago when the shops had their VIP sales."

According to China customs and the China E-commerce Research Center, over 18 million Chinese consumers bought goods online from overseas last year, spending 140 billion yuan, or nearly 22 billion US dollars.