Indonesia joins China's 'Double Eleven' shopping spree

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02:17

The "Double Eleven" shopping festival, now considered one of the largest digital retail events globally, has become an opportunity for sellers outside China to introduce their products to Chinese consumers.

This year's shopping festival is a big one for Indonesia. Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba has collaborated with the Indonesian government to sell five local Indonesian products through its platform.

All of the products are food-based and one of them is the popular instant noodle sold by Indofood.

"With the advanced e-commerce in China and the increasing popularity of the 'Double Eleven' shopping day, we are actually hoping to ride on this wave of excitement through our participation there," said Yong Yu, regional manager of the international operations division of Indofood.

"We hope this event will be an eye-opener for Chinese consumers and of course also the Internet users...we hope Indonesian products will be sold in several different e-commerce platforms in China," he added.

Competition is tight. Indofood's products will be sold alongside 180,000 other products from China and other countries, at discounted prices.

In 2017, sales reached more than 30 billion US dollars in 24 hours. By 15:49 BJT of this year's shopping day, Alibaba has seen its sales surpass last year's whole-day record.

Alibaba Singles' Day sales surpass last year's whole-day record of 168.2 billion yuan ($24 bln) at 15:49 BJT, November 11, 2018./VCG Photo

The Indonesian government has high expectations for the Chinese market.

"Indonesian brands are starting to go global and we want to support that. We've seen many of our local products entering new markets globally and China is a very important market for us," said Shinta Kamdani, deputy chairperson of Indonesia's Chamber of Commerce.

"Obviously with a population that size, I think this will help increase more exports of Indonesian products into China," he added.

The project proves to be beneficial for both parties. Indonesian companies are able to observe how their products are being received in the Chinese market, and in turn open up more opportunities to present their products internationally.