Here it comes again. Not two weeks after China's Double 11 shopping spree, the American shopping festival Black Friday is hitting China with deals on imported products. China's cross-border e-commerce websites have been competing with each other to get more from Chinese consumers' pockets. It's all aimed at China's rising consumption. Chen Tong has the story.  

Staff at this cross-border platform in Shanghai have been busy preparing for Black Friday for a week. The company began its promotions for imported products a week before Black Friday, and 40,000 orders arrived in the first minute after the shopping festival started.

CAI HUA, CO-FOUNDER YMATOU.COM "The number of payments saw a tremendous increase last Friday. Chinese people have more and more demand for overseas products. We're also following the discounts in the United States and will offer them this Friday. And let these Chinese consumers continue to buy, buy, buy."

This year Yangmatou is giving red packets worth one thousand yuan to every consumer using its app. They're not the only company offering Black Friday benefits. Amazon, for example, will focus on logistics. VIP clients are guaranteed an average delivery time of between 5 and 9 days this year. Alibaba's T-mall is cooperating with US retail giants Macys and Costco using their famous branding to attract Chinese shoppers. There have been concerns in the industry that the Black Friday sales will be hurt by the success of this year's Double 11, but there seems to still be plenty of interest in US shopping. What they're looking for however, is quite different from what they found on Double 11.

CONSUMER "I usually buy household items during Double 11 or Double 12, and then I buy famous brands' clothes on Black Friday."

CONSUMER "I buy bags, cosmetics and watches, though I do have to pay attention to changing prices. To people like me who have just started working, price is still an important issue."

Chinese shoppers' preference for more high-end and luxury goods during Black Friday reflects China's upgrading consumption sector. And that gives opportunities for smaller cross-border e-commerce websites to grab consumers away from e-commerce giants like Taobao and JD.com.

WEICHONG KHOR, HEAD OF DIGITAL & E-COMMERCE CARAT CHINA "The upgrade of China's consumption is very obvious. For a lot of segments, it grows very tremendously. That also means consumers start to look at more high-quality products, better experience, some of segments that were not popular in the past become more and more important. That's a drive behind the cross-border consumption."

China's cross-border e-commerce business is expanding broadly across the country. Data from Yangmatou show that the number of consumers born in the 1980s now accounts for about 40 percent of all its shoppers, of whom an increasing number come from border provinces like Xinjiang and Yunnan. With the upgrading of consumer behavior, the size of China's e-commerce market is expected to reach 8.8 trillion yuan in 2018.