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Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, has not released the overall sales on its Tmall and Taobao platforms. Alibaba, which is facing fierce competition from other platforms, weakened consumer demand and regulatory scrutiny, stopped disclosing overall Singles’ Day sales data last year.
The figure, which has been seen as a barometer on the health of China’s e-commerce industry, was likely withheld because it does not paint a rosy picture.
Meanwhile, third-party data showed a bleak picture for the Singles’ Day shopping season. Pre-orders on Tmall for the last week of October were flat year on year, according to research firm YipitData. The number of merchants taking part in presales dropped 18 per cent from a year ago, the firm said.
A representative for Belgian brand Loop Earplugs, which entered the mainland China market in May via Alibaba’s Tmall Global, said the “first wave was a little below expectations, but not that bad”.
“We were mainly surprised by how much the sales fluctuated,” said Arne Van Craeyevelt, global expansion manager for the company. “After the first wave we went from almost 300 sales a day to 50 a day. In other markets, the seasonality of shopping festivals have a less pronounced impact on the daily sales.”
An employee sorts packages for delivery ahead of the Singles’ Day shopping festival at Tianma E-commerce Industrial Park in China’s Jiangsu province, November 1, 2022. Photo: AFP
Loop Earplugs also plans to sell on other platforms in China, such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and Xiaohongshu, China’s answer to Instagram.
Rebecka Strömberg at Swedish brand Maria Nila said Singles’ Day sales did not meet its target but the company was “overall happy” with the results. “We had set a very ambitious target this year, as we had understood that this was one of the biggest [events] during the year,” Strömberg said.
Daniel Zhang Yong, chairman and CEO of Alibaba, said in a statement on Monday that digital commerce offered an “unprecedented opportunity for global SMEs to tap into the vitality of China’s consumer sector and for Chinese SMEs to expand to new markets globally”.