Alibaba and JD Prepare For Multi-Billion Dollar Singles Day Sale
Two of the biggest e-commerce retailers in the world prepare for their annual billion dollar online sales event which takes place this November. The special ‘Singles Day’ event is an annual event where Alibaba and JD promote heavily and sell millions of products at a discount and consistently generated billions of dollars on this special singles day.
Alibaba’s singles day is expected to take place on the 11th of November and is currently in the process of testing all its logistics and servers to ensure that it can take the load of sales that is expected on the 11th of November. Alibaba’s competitor, JD.com which is backed by Tencent Holdings recently filed a case with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce stating that Alibaba had used anti-competitive practices to gain an unfair advantage for the singles day promotion.
Their rivalry also appears to be acrimonious after JD last week lodged a complaint to regulator the State Administration for Industry and Commerce for alleged anti-competitive practices by Alibaba in Singles Day promotional activities. Jack Ma’s Ali Baba started their marketing campaign for the singles day event on the 13th of October and JD started its marketing campaign on the 27th of October.
JD.com started promoting singles day aggressively from the 1st of November and claims to have the biggest fulfillment infrastructure structure in place than any other e-commerce provider in China.
In 2014, Alibaba sold $9.3 billion in gross merchandise volume on singles day via its e-commerce platform and registered customers from over 217 countries who placed more than 278 million orders within a 24 hour period. The company expects to surpass those numbers in 2015 as there are a higher number of retailers and merchants who have signed up to be a part of the singles day event. There has also been an increase in the number of tablet and smartphone users and Alibaba expects a lot more business to come in via their apps.
In a statement, Alicia Yap, the head of China internet research at Barclays said
We believe that this year, the investors’ focus will be on the competition between Alibaba and JD. We expect [Alibaba’s] mobile gross merchandise volume to record a new high during this year’s Singles Day, likely higher than the 62 per cent [the company posted] in the recent quarter to September
The volumes generated by Alibaba far surpass any revenue generated by U.S. e-commerce retailers made during 2014 Cyber Monday which was estimated to be around $2.04 billion only.
