Days ahead of Alibaba’s global 11.11 shopping extravaganza, big brands are already cashing in on the shopping momentum.
The Chinese e-commerce behemoth said this week that over 100 brands, including Nike, Adidas, Apple, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder and Lancôme, generated RMB100 million (or $15 million at current exchange) in gross merchandise volume just 111 minutes into the first sales period of the event. (Gross merchandise volume refers to the total value of merchandise sold on an e-commerce marketplace during a certain time period.)
This year, Alibaba joined a growing list of international retailers — Walmart, Target and Amazon among them — stretching out the timelines of their 2020 holiday sales events in a bid to upend shipping and logistical challenges heightened by the coronavirus pandemic.
The 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, formerly referred to as Singles Day, offers two shopping windows: Nov. 1-3 and on November 11, the day it is typically held.
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Alibaba, which has continued to make significant strides in the fashion space, on Thursday announced a landmark partnership with luxury digital titans, Farfetch and Richemont. The global strategic union is billed as a move to offer luxury brands “enhanced access to the China market,” and to accelerate the digitization of the global luxury industry.
In that same vein, Alibaba said nearly 200 luxury brands joined this year’s 11.11 festival; among them Montblanc, Piaget and IWC Schaffhausen. Cartier, meanwhile, hosted its first jewelry show on Taobao Live, unveiling more than 400 timepieces and jewelry items. Cartier’s livestream, noted Alibaba, attracted 770,000 viewers in two hours.
As the coronavirus pandemic rages on across the world, and the United States continues to see record daily totals of new infections, Alibaba said the results from the first 11.11 shopping window indicate a “solid rebound of consumer spending in China.”
The e-tail giant on Thursday reported results for the quarter ended Sept. 30., with revenues up 30% year over year to RMB155,059 million (or $22.8 million at current change). Annual active consumers on its China retail marketplaces reached 757 million, an increase of 15 million from the twelve months period ended June 30, 2020.
