Singles Day
Singles’ Day: online shopping with mega discounts
Bargains and discounts galore! This is Singles’ Day. If you like fishing for discounts and hunting for bargains, you will love Singles’ Day. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are yesterday’s news. The new big thing in the sales world is Singles’ Day, which originates in China. Every 11th November, the day generates unimaginable sales for Chinese online retailers in just a few seconds, and breaks its own records, year after year.
And slowly but surely, Singles’ Day is also gaining traction in Europe. Many European online retailers have already jumped on the Singles’ Day bandwagon and are reducing their merchandise just for this day. We too are offering crazy discounts that will make the bargain hunter in you go wild!
Several years ago, the Chinese online platform Alibaba made 11/11 a day of bumper discounts. Because what better way is there to make up for being alone than with a major shopping spree – online, of course. Since then, 11th November has been the number one day for online retail. Now, European retailers have also taken notice of the date and draw in customers from around the world with enormous discounts.
Sales carnage that breaks all records
If you thought that everything goes crazy on Black Friday, the American counterpart to Singles’ Day, you haven’t experienced Singles’ Day yet. While Black Friday discounts have been extended to last the entire Thanksgiving Weekend and Cyber Monday in the USA, Singles’ Day is limited to one day.
Nevertheless, the day generates substantial sales revenue for retailers. In 2017, Singles’ Day generated the equivalent of 25.3 million US dollars – 40 percent more than the year before, when online retail generated sales of 17.8 billion dollars. By comparison, the entire Thanksgiving weekend “only” made 8.3 billion dollars. On Singles’ Day, consumers in China buy more than US citizens on Black Friday and Cyber Monday put together. Incredible figures, generated by Chinese e-commerce on this still relatively unknown date.
And the insanity doesn’t end there: on Singles’ Day, China’s biggest online retailer Alibaba recorded 256.00 transactions per second. Within the first two minutes of the gigantic discount battle, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon brought in sales of – wait for it – two billion dollars. Within the next hour, Alibaba’s sales increased to ten billion dollars.
The Singles’ Day tradition
Singles’ Day originates in China. Since the 1990s, China has celebrated the day for singles, which not-coincidentally falls on 11/11. The four ones in the date symbolise exactly that: singledom.
The day was first celebrated by single men at a university in China. Since then, numerous singles’ parties and blind dates are organised on 11th November to help singles find a partner. In the “Middle Kingdom”, partnership, marriage and family are of great importance. There is no shame in being single in China, but it is seen as a disadvantage.
The People’s Republic has a particularly high number of people without a partner – around 143 million. This can be attributed to the political situation of the country: until only a few years ago, Chinese couples were only allowed to have one child. The one-child policy led to a preference for male children, so that now there is a huge excess of young men. For every 100 women, there are 117 men, so it’s no wonder that 11 percent of the Chinese population – most of them men – are single.
