With COVID-19 restricting offline trade to a large extent, online shopping -- just like online work from home tools -- is expected to grow by leaps and bounds in 2020 and beyond.?And China is once again showing the world how it's done, breaking old records and creating new ones that are just mind-boggling to wrap your head around.?
China just experienced one of its biggest online shopping festivals -- the 2020 "Double Eleven" 11:11 Global Festival organised by Alibaba group.
The massive festival went on for eleven days and managed to generate a whopping RMB498.2 billion (approximately $74.1 billion) worth of trade in that time frame. This is a 26 percent increase compared to the same sale that happened in 2019.?To give you some context, this is ten times more than what all of US spent online on Black Friday in 2019, according to Forbes.
According to?Alibaba,?over 470 brands were able to generate over RMB100 million. The infrastructure received 583,000 orders per second which is crazy. These included not just shopping for electronics and home items, but actually buying homes and other real estate properties online: 800,000 real estate properties across 300 cities in China were on sale -- just think about that, buying homes online, sounds crazy, right??
People also bought vehicles in the massive shopping festival -- orders for over 330,000 vehicles were placed, in a matter of 11 days.
There were crazy deals on airline tickets on Figgy, where 11 airlines saw the sale of over 100,000 fly-as-you-wish packages, which as per Alibaba¡¯s claims, secured a considerable passenger volume for the coming six months.?
Alibaba¡¯s Cainiao Network processed more than 2.32 billion delivery orders cumulatively over the 11-day period.
The top categories of imported products ranked by GMV were: food supplements, facial beauty tools, infant and toddler milk powder, skincare sets and facial masks as of 09:00am on November 11 based on accumulation starting from 00:00am of November 1.
Jiang Fan, President of Taobao and Tmall expressed his happiness for the success of the 11-day sale in a statement, ¡°Over the past 12 years, innovation has been at the heart of 11.11 and along the way it became a global consumer festival. 11.11 is defined by our consumers, merchants and our partners across the ecosystem, and also a beneficiary of all the support from society. We will continue to focus on developing our digital infrastructure in the service of empowering merchants of all sizes to find a path to success in the digital economy.¡±
If anyone thought COVID-19 was going to slow down online trade worldwide, boy were they wrong. And Alibaba's 11.11 shopping festival in China is no doubt a glimpse of what's possible for e-commerce in India and around the world in the near future.