Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba

China’s “Double 11” online shopping day is now offline too.

“Double 11,” China’s annual online shopping spree that begins on Dec. 11, will no longer be restricted to the Internet starting this year, said a senior executive of the country’s e-commerce giant Alibaba during a recent interview.

The online business has already evolved into a form of “new retail” that integrates both online and offline channels, said Chris Tung, chief marketing officer of Alibaba.

Alibaba’s online shopping platform Tmall held a press conference on the “Double 11” global shopping festival on Tuesday.

Daniel Zhang, CEO of the e-commerce titan, noted that a whole new shopping experience has been created through online and offline integrations.

Zhang said over 1 million stores from home and abroad have integrated their online and offline services. This year, 52 core commercial circles, 100,000 smart stores, 600,000 retail shops, 50,000 reputable shops, and 30,000 rural service centers will be participating in the shopping craze.

The shopping festival this year is a panorama of Alibaba’s economic ecology, covering physical commodities, digital products, entertainment, online-offline interaction, urban and rural services, as well as domestic and overseas business, said Zhang.

Tung told thepaper.cn that instead of being a retailer, Alibaba places more importance on the establishment of data-driven retail models, hoping to inject impetus to offline stores with big data technology.

He said Alibaba will record purchase information of offline customers and have it processed by the databank, allowing merchants to conduct their secondary operations for targeted consumers.