The impact of Covid-19, along with rapid demographic and lifestyle shifts in China, underpinned new consumer behavior and trends seen during this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang said.
Speaking at a forum in Shanghai this week, Zhang said the annual shopping event – now in its 12th year – featured a number of key changes so that Alibaba could better serve brands and consumers. Originally a one-day festival, 11.11 was extended to 11 days this year. It wasn’t simply about pumping up sales. It was also about giving merchants and brands impacted by the pandemic a longer period to interact with and build up relationships with customers. It also took some of the pressure off of infrastructure, improving the experience for consumers, for example, by giving them more deals to pursue and ensuring orders for delivery weren’t all jammed into a single day.
The approach yielded strong results, with a record 250,000 brands and over 800 million consumers participating, and gross merchandise volume also at an all-time high of $74.1 billion.