More dissections for the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival

More analysis is now available on this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, during which Alibaba announced a record-breaking US$25.3 billion of gross merchandise volume (GMV) settled through Alipay on November 11, 2017.

Singapore consumers recorded a 63% year-on-year increase in spending on the Tmall and Taobao e-marketplaces, both Alibaba properties, with the first order from Singapore being a coffee table. Singapore brands on Tmall also saw 240% year-on-year growth in GMV on their products. 

Drilling down deeper: 

Clothing was the No. 1 product category for consumers buying from Singapore, being ranked No. 1, 2 and 9. Consumer electronics also ranked highly, being in No. 3, 8 and 10 positions. Household goods made up the final umbrella category, being in the No. 4, 5, 6, and 7 places.

Chinese consumers however went specifically for health supplements, over-the-counter medicines, food and mother-and-baby products.

It seems likely that more female shoppers from Singapore are either involved in the sale, or that they buy more as the top product category is dresses. Baby-related purchases, traditionally attributed to mothers, are also a significant part of the top categories.

Top-Selling Product Categories Among Singapore Consumers From Tmall and Taobao
1.       Dresses 2.       T-shirts 3.       Mobile phones 4.       Tables 5.       Sofas	6.       Cabinets 7.       Lights 8.       Robot vacuum cleaners 9.       Pants 10.    Mobile phone accessories

Top Brands That Singapore-based Chinese Consumers Bought
1.       US Clinicals - health supplements 2.       LAC - health supplements 3.       Avalon - health supplements 4.       Expressions - beauty products 5.    Tiger Balm	6.      Hegen - baby feeding products 7.       Maju - health supplements 8.       Nature’s Farm - health supplements 9.       New Moon - canned foods

*Rankings based on Tmall Global, an extension of Tmall that houses brands without physical operations in China

Top 10 Product Categories For Singapore-based Chinese Consumers
1.       Health supplements excluding cordyceps 2.       Maternal skincare 3.       Seasoning - mainly spices 4.       Bodycare products 5.       Coffee	6.       Infant and toddler nutrition 7.       Casual shoes 8.       Face masks 9.       Instant drinks - mainly powdered  10.   Cordyceps sinensis (herbal remedy)

*Rankings based on Tmall Global, an extension of Tmall that houses brands without physical operations in China

A total of 1.48 billion transactions were processed by Alipay in the entire 24 hours. Alipay processed 100 million transactions in the first 7 minutes 23 seconds of the shopping festival and handled 256,000 payment transactions per second at its peak within the first 10 minutes of the shopping festival. Behind the numbers is Ant Financial’s proprietary finance-grade distributed relational database, OceanBase, which processed 42 million requests per second at its peak.

In addition, 860 million insurance policies were issued via Ant Financial in the 24 hours. Ant Financial worked with 12 insurance companies to design insurance products for online shoppers, such as damage-during-shipping insurance and refund insurance, which covers buyers’ shipping cost should they wish to return their purchases.

Ant Financial used technologies like image recognition to process 90% of the total insurance claims, greatly shortening the process. In the few months leading up to the shopping festival, online lender MYbank, an Alibaba affiliate, provided micro loans totalling over RMB100 billion to over 1.6 million online merchants, with zero human intervention in the loan granting process.

Consumer engagement also went up on November 11, 2017. According to Alibaba, a total of 7.4 billion mobile interactions and 6.8 billion “likes” were recorded on Tmall and Taobao during the Countdown Gala Celebration that aired in the hours leading up to Double 11’s midnight launch. And from November 1-10, more than 8 million users tried Buy+, Alibaba’s end-to-end virtual reality shopping experience.

During the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival each user opened the Taobao or Tmall mobile apps an average of 16 times during that period, spending an average of 51 minutes while they were logged on, Alibaba said. That’s about double the seven openings/25 minutes those consumers typically register on any other day of the year.

More highlights are in the infographic below.