Amazon to up the ante with Black Friday sales
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E-mail China Daily, November 19, 2015
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The logo of Amazon.com. [File photo] |
Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc is planning to use the upcoming Black Friday shopping festival to consolidate its cross-border credentials and retail presence in China.
Black Friday, which is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day, falls on Nov 26 this year. It is regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in Western countries like the United States and a period when retailers offer massive discounts to attract consumers.
Amazon's China unit has rolled out a massive promotional plan for the event and plans to attract Chinese consumers with more overseas selections at lower prices and cheaper shipping costs.
Doug Gurr, president of Amazon China, said his company's vision is all about cross-border e-commerce. "One important part (of the vision) is to help Chinese customers find the most authentic brands around the world."
Amazon China, which introduced the Black Friday shopping festival to China last year, said this year's event, which runs from Wednesday to Dec 5, will showcase millions of items from 40 countries and also offer reduction up to 50 percent in shipping costs from Europe.
Gurr said that Black Friday is the leading shopping festival in the world.
"Only Amazon can bring all of its products to Chinese customers," he said, adding Amazon, which runs 14 online platforms across the world, has a strong relationship with several leading global suppliers.
Amazon China's Black Friday comes close on the heels of the Nov 11 shopping festival, in which e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd alone generated 91.2 billion yuan (US$14.29 billion) in gross merchandise volume during the 24-hour event.
Alibaba, which accounts for more than half of China's business-to-customer online shopping market, also had globalization as its theme for the Nov 11 shopping event. About 30 million orders were made by customers to purchase overseas products during the event, it said.
Some analysts have expressed concerns that the Nov 11 shopping event has already overdrawn China's consumption power.
But Wang Xiaoxing, an analyst with Internet consultancy Analysys International, said Chinese buyers still have an appetite for overseas shopping.
"Cross-border shopping is all about buying things that cannot be easily purchased in China. Amazon has abundant global suppliers, who can surpass all of China's e-commerce players. It may never grow to be as big as Alibaba or JD.com Inc, but it has chosen the most rapidly growing market in China's e-commerce sector," he said.
Yang Xiaoxing, a 27-year-old white-collar worker in Beijing, said she is getting ready to shop for Black Friday. "I shopped mainly for my parents on Nov 11. Most of the foreign brands I was looking for haven't opened stores on Tmall Global. So I will certainly try my luck on Black Friday sales to see if I can grab some good cross-border deals," she said.
Cross-border shopping on the rise
About one-third of China's online shoppers made cross-border purchases this year, a new report said on Wednesday.
The joint research released by PayPal Holdings Inc, a United States company which operates a global online payments system, and Ipsos, the Paris-based market research company, said that about 35 percent of the online shoppers in China have made cross-border transactions this year.
The second global cross-border commerce report from the two companies said that 26 percent of Chinese online shoppers made cross-border purchases in 2014.
Despite the rapid growth in cross-border shopping in China, Ireland, Austria and Israel are the most active cross-border shoppers with 86 percent, 85 percent and 79 percent, respectively, of online shoppers having made cross-border purchases in the past 12 months.
The research, which investigated the online and cross-border shopping habits of more than 23,200 consumers in 29 countries, showed that China's overall online shopping population seems to be approaching its peak, with 81 percent of the online adults making purchases in the past 12 months, compared with 80 percent in 2014.
Among all the respondents, shoppers from China were the most mobile savvy in cross-border shopping. About 34 percent of the Chinese online shoppers made purchases via mobile devices in the past 12 months compared with a global average of 16 percent.
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