Retail in Asia

In Markets

China’s Single’s Day online shopping festival going offline this year

In an effort to bridge the gap between the online and offline shopping worlds, China’s Single’s Day online shopping festival is expanding this year to traditional stores.

Alizila, the news website of the Alibaba Group, reported that a number of brands on Tmall are extending their promotional actives to some 30,000 physical stores.

By encouraging shoppers to visit stores to touch, feel and try out the products, retailers hope to encourage sales. However, they can still opt to buy the goods online.

"Those who decide to buy can scan product QR codes using their mobile phones to add them directly to their virtual Tmall shopping carts," the report said.

Alizila explained that the online and offline e-commerce or also called “online-to-offline” (O2O) is trending in China as traditional retailers, afraid of losing market share to online competitors , are trying to find synergies between their digital and traditional sales operations.

The decision to integrate O2O with China’s biggest e-shopping day is meant to encourage transformation in the brick-and-mortar retail industry and to further refine Alibaba Group’s own O2O initiatives, said Maggie Wu, a senior director at Tmall.com.

“We hope to bring the O2O concept to reality this year,” said Wu. “Through the 11.11 consumer festivities, we hope to be able to broaden people’s mindsets and inspire merchants and the industry players to catch up with the changes in the e-commerce sector.”