LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE SHOPPING CARNIVAL

LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE SHOPPING CARNIVAL

As the China’s Single Day and Black Friday are coming within two months, let’s talk something about them.

Background

Black Friday：Black Friday is the day following the Thanksgiving Day. Originally, the phrase Black Friday means the heavy traffic jam after Thanksgiving. Since 1952, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US. Major retail store would open very early and provide lots of promotion choice. And it has become the busiest shopping day since 2005.

Double 11：The write of November 11^th is written as 11—11. And these four barely sticks emphasis the meaning of “bachelor” in this special date, so it also called the Single day. Why the bachelor has their own festivals in China? Single days began as an anti-Valentine’s Days since 1990s from Nanjing University. It’s known that because of the imbalance of the gender in China. The one-child policy has been ended these days. But it affect deeply on Chinese gender situation. There were lots of families would choose to abortion when they get pregnant with a girl in the few years before. Because the culture let them think a son would led to a male surplus. In 2011, official Chinese data show that there were 20m more men than women under the age of 30. And with the gap would become bigger in the following years.  

In 2009, the chief of Alibaba spotted a commercial opportunity on this day and began launching “double 11” online shopping.

The strategy of Double 11 and Black Friday

1.     Cost leadership. This means the companies offer more affordable products because the costumers want to have an opportunity to buy lots of things and cost less money than the product’s original price. Except discount strategy, the “zero” marginal cost is also the part of cost leadership strategy. The traditional physical stores have limited ability to handle with massive costumers compare with online digital shops. One of significant characteristic of digital word is much less margin cost. In the early years of Black Friday, the promotion is only limited within the traditional stores. Now, it could become a worldwide shopping carnival. But the only thing companies want to sell the products worldwide might be just create an English version shopping pages. For Double 11, it was started from a Alibaba, the biggest online shopping centre, so they don’t need to worry about the much marginal cost as much as physical stores.

2.     Make the shopping period unique. The Black Friday and Double 11 are both seasonal event. If the Black Friday and Double 11 happened every month or every week, people won’t value the event.

3.     Advertising. Since 2010, Double 11’s advertising has become more attractive. They started to advertise since almost two weeks ago. Most shops on Tmall started to post their promotion on their social net work page, or post their well-designed poster on the eye-catching position on other websites. The same as Black Friday, the shops started to send email about promotion to users weeks ago, and put their ads according to cookie on Google and any other worldwide website. So the “preheat” of the shopping carnival is also very important. Advertising could mobilize the enthusiasm of customers.

In conclusion, Black Friday and Double 11 has their own culture behind, but the online selling strategy has many common points. With the deeply penetration of digitalization, the shopping digital platform will bring our life more different.