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Singles’ Day—the world’s largest annual online shopping event—will see its thirteenth iteration on Nov. 11. What began in China in 2009 with only 27 merchants has ballooned into an international bonanza featuring celebrities, livestreamed performances, and hundreds of thousands of participating retailers ranging from small businesses to top designer brands.
Market watchers view the annual “Double 11” festival, as it’s also called in China, as a barometer of consumption power in the world’s most populous nation—and going by that metric, consumption has been robust. In 2020, Alibaba and rival platform JD.com recorded a reported $115 billion in transactions over the 11-day event season, despite the onslaught of COVID-19. By comparison, marketing data firm Adobe Analytics found that online transactions at 80 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. amounted to $9 billion on Black Friday last year, with $10.8 billion racked up on Cyber Monday.
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Read more: How China Is Cracking Down on Its Once Untouchable Tech Titans
But the credit cards of Chinese consumers may not take such a beating this year. A government crackdown on tech companies has left the main players subdued and cautious, while China’s carbon neutral pledges, as well as a campaign against social inequality, have seen conspicuous consumption fall, at least temporarily, out of political favor.
Fashion insiders are also concerned about the impact the supply chain crisis will have on the event, with European brands potentially struggling to fulfill Chinese orders. “If you have a manufacturing base in Asia, you could bypass the bottlenecks in Europe as you’re closer to the market,” a retail analyst in the U.K., Paul Martin, told the venerable British trade journal Draper’s. “But we know many products are sent from factories in China to the U.K. to be shipped to Chinese customers and supply chains are under a lot of pressure.”
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Source : time
