What do you want to buy during this year's Double 11 shopping festival? This has become one of the hottest topics for Chinese netizens recently, as the world's largest online shopping festival is just around the corner, which was created by China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group in 2009.

Entering its second decade, November 11th has become an annual consumption carnival with record high sales volume. In 2018, Alibaba's Tmall platform GMV reached over 213.5 billion yuan or 30 billion U.S. dollars on November 11.

The most competitive Double 11 shopping festival

This year's online shopping festival is expected to be the most competitive, as many online platforms have determined to upgrade their market strategies to attract more customers.

Alibaba's Tmall has stated that over 200,000 brands will be participating in this year's gala. Among these brands, one million new products on offer and participation from more than 500 million users are expected – about 100 million more than last year. Estimated consumer savings from brand and platform promotions and coupons are around 50 billion yuan.

Different platforms are expected to take different approaches in boosting sales, some with coupons and discounts, others hire some KOLs to livestream and help them sell products. Those which can attract more young consumers will determine how big its future market is.

More Global brands joined online platforms

Tmall's President Jiang Fan announced that of the 200,000 participating brands, more than 22,000 are international brands from 78 countries and regions.

Mondelēz Internationa's China General Manager Joost Vlaanderen said he is very confident about this year's Double 11 sales, their goal is to smash last year's sales volume by launching more new products. He also said online sales give him faster feedback to know more about customers' needs.

Focusing on less-developed markets

A growing number of domestic and global sellers are also targeting customers from less-developed markets. In the last quarter, over 70 percent of Alibaba's new annual active consumers came from lower-tier cities.

Budweiser's China President Fred Freire also said one of the benefits of participating in the Double 11 shopping festival is the opportunity of boosting sales in lower tier cities. While offline, it is slower to expand the market to tier-two or -three cities, but now if they go online, it will be much easier and faster to reach their customers there.

Re-inventing domestic brands with digital strategies

In addition to global brands, Double 11 has also become a playing ground for domestic brands to attract young customers. Bosideng, a Chinese manufacturer of down jackets, has sold well in 72 countries such as the U.S., France and Italy. The company has joined the Double 11 shopping festival from the very beginning. Each year it will promote a lot of new products with fashionable designs. Many stores have applied an online-plus-offline strategy, which means they have a lot of different coupons and activities both on brick-and-mortar stores and online platforms.

New Consumption and Greener Society

Many international and domestic brands have changed the original release date of new products to participate in the promotion, offering attractive discounts. A total of 215 brands including Lancome, SK-II, YSL, Givenchy and Shiseido customized 241 exclusive goods for the festival.

More than 500 million people will join in the Tmall "Double 11" Global Shopping Festival this year, Tmall President Jiang Fan said at the kick-off conference, seeing an estimated increase of 100 million year-on-year. But he reiterated that the company is not focusing on the GMV growth that much. They want to bring more new products, more coupons and greener consumption concepts for customers.