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November 12, 2016

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Online splurging easier than ever with payment apps

By Andy Boreham | November 12, 2016, Saturday | Print Edition

EDITOR’S note:

Andy Boreham comes from New Zea­land’s capital city, Wellington, and has lived in China, off and on, for the past four years. Now he is living in Shanghai earning a master’s degree in Chinese culture and language at Fudan University. He welcomes your feedback on all of the issues he covers — you can reach him at andy.boreham@shanghaidaily.com.

Last night I went to bed earlier than usual, at around 11pm. It was an uneventful day, much of the usual. But I was sharply woken at the stroke of mid­night by a collective sigh of relief from consumers in my building, my neighbourhood and across China. The world’s largest online shopping frenzy, Double 11, was over for another year.

Today it’s time to check the damage. Shopaholics will take stock of the dent that’s been made in their wallets; their partners will clear room for all the new goodies to arrive; and those poor couriers will start biking millions of packages around the streets of China.

Double 11 (November 11), or Singles Day, is a relatively new festival that’s taken China by storm. It started as a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day, a day where single men and women across the country could escape from the pains of single life and celebrate, if only for 24 hours, every November 11. The date was chosen for its numerical similarity to loneliness: a whole lot of ones. Sigh.

But in 2009 things were to change, and they changed fast. Billionaire Jack Ma and his shop­ping platform Alibaba decided to hijack the festivities and an­nounced that singles should mask their collective misery by buying a gift for themselves, much like couples buy each other gifts on Valentine’s Day. And what better place than Ali­baba’s own Tmall and Taobao?

Alibaba came up with the name Double 11 (shuang shiyi) and promoted November 11 as the ultimate online shopping day.

The new-look festival became a huge success, and soon other online shopping malls were get­ting in on the act, piggybacking on the new name and promot­ing their own Double 11 sales.

Alibaba put a stop to that by registering the name as a brand, which was approved by the State Administration for In­dustry and Commerce in 2013.

Now other online retailers get around the legal issues by refer­ring to their November 11 sales as anything but Double 11, and Singles Day has morphed into Singles Day and Couples’ Day and Shopping Day — a day worth waiting every year for, promis­ing tons of specials, discounts and flashy new products.

But it’s Alibaba that takes the lion’s share of sales, breaking records every year since the Double 11 festival, in its cur­rent form, began less than a decade ago.

Last year Alibaba facilitated 91.2 billion yuan (US$13.4 bil­lion) in sales on November 11 — this year that record has been smashed — making it the larg­est single shopping day not only in China, but the entire world. Awhopping 120,000 purchases were made every minute.

It’s become somewhat of a compulsion — and obsession — for many Chinese to shop online on November 11, for no other reason than “that’s what we do, whether we want to or not.”

As an example, I owe a close friend money, and just this week I sent it to him using WeChat. I was shocked to see my payment rejected. Why? “Don’t send it to me this week!” he replied in a flurry. “If you do I’ll just spend it on Double 11!”

What is it that fuels this obsession? How can a festival celebrating singledom turn into a mad online shopping free-for-all? To be honest, I don’t know the answer either. But at least part of it, I reckon, must be to do with just how easy it is to flick off digital cash in China.

WeChat and Alipay were re­cently voted the “most relevant” brands for Chinese consumers, and it’s not hard to see why. They are ubiquitous in urban Chinese life and, for a great number of Chinese, these apps have taken over more traditional methods of communication and spend­ing money.

You can use either of these apps to send and receive money at the touch of a screen. Even street vendors now accept digi­tal payment via WeChat and Alipay.

I’m heading back home for a few weeks in the winter, and to be honest I’m seriously won­dering how I’m going to cope without being able to send and receive cash via WeChat. The girl at McDonald’s will prob­ably be quite bewildered when I suddenly, without realizing it, hold my phone up to her with my WeChat barcode.

It’s no wonder that the rest of the world are watching with eyes bulging, hoping to learn from China’s successes with digital payments and online shopping. Maybe other countries will start their own November 11 festi­vals. I hope they remember that the name Double 11 is taken!

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