• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, November 9, 2015

Even as we speak, hundreds of millions of people are gearing up to spend billions of dollars in a shopping frenzy Americans know next to nothing about. As the clock turns to midnight and ushers in Nov. 11, e-commerce site Alibaba throws the world’s biggest shopping party, known as Double 11 or Singles' Day. Sales are so fast and furious -- reaching $9 billion in 24 hours -- that it makes our Cyber Monday, with $2 billion in sales, look like a PTA fundraiser. That’s more than Cyber Monday and Black Friday combined.

And while most marketers are aware of the phenomenon, “they don’t really seem to have a sense of how much fun it is,” says Katherine Wilson, director of marketing insights at Clavis Insight, which focuses on online store analytics and is tracking this year’s Double 11. “And it’s very different from the way American companies offer online shopping.”

At TMall, the Alibaba site that transformed the holiday into an e-commerce free-for-all, “the events are just so much more entertaining,” she tells Marketing Daily. “The graphics are fun. There are gifts embedded in the site. There are games and contests — this year, for example, the kickoff includes bidding on a Cadillac, and the first hundred people to put in a down payment also get half off the price of the car. There’s even an arts festival associated with the event, that entertains people while they shop online.”

By comparison, it makes America’s doorbuster mentality seem downright dusty. It helps, of course, that the holiday’s origins are more fun than America’s seasonal holidays. It was begun back in the 1990s by a bunch of young, girlfriendless Chinese students, who nicknamed themselves diaosi. (Polite people translate it as loser; literally, she says it means penis hair. Either way, it’s not a happy word.) They picked 11/11 as “their” day, and pretty soon, it became a fun way to either celebrate or rue your single status. People threw parties, buying gifts for single friends as well as themselves. 

By 2009, Alibaba made it an e-commerce event and it’s just exploded as a fun reason to shop, no matter who you are. And with each year, Wilson says it has become a more complex event, with Jingdong and Amazon China getting in on the action. “We’re amazed as we harvest the data,” she says, “with people buying everything from cars to fresh grapefruit. Electronics are big, as is apparel. Cosmetics are huge, and things like North Face and Columbia jackets are really popular. It’s decidedly not a 'Poor me, I’m single’ day any longer.”

Clavis predicts sales this year will reach $10 billion.

While the event is primarily a Chinese, it is spreading, she says, including into pockets of the U.S. and Russia. “But it coincides both with Veteran’s Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in the U.K., which are somber, so that’s a challenge.”

In order to let people pre-shop and increase the gamesmanship, TMall lets consumers start shopping early in several ways. They can make a down payment to get deals, often as little as 10%. And in some cases, doing so entitles them to a deeper discount. And there are flash sales. For example, one offered a 999 RMB bottle of Moet Chandon Brut Imperial, already on promotion for 399.80 RMB, for just 11.11 RMB. And then there are ‘red envelopes,’ coupon rewards for early shoppers, who can spend them like cash on the big day.