E-commerce sites gear up for China’s multi-billion-dollar online shopping bonanza on Monday

November 11 is the craziest day on the Chinese internet. And that’s saying something.

The date has been known as Single’s Day for some time (due to the 11/11 symbolism), but the recent e-commerce explosion in China has seen the day morph into something new – a blow-out shopfest of bargains and big spending.

How big is it exactly? Last year, Alibaba’s two e-commerce marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, collectively processed $3 billion in sales in the 24-hours of last November 11. That meant that two Chinese e-commerce stores saw sales worth more than double America’s entire Cyber Monday shopping spree.

$4.9 billion in the bag?

Alibaba executives suggest that this year’s shopapolooza could see $4.9 billion spent on 11/11, which is this coming Monday.

Rival e-commerce sites are not so keen on revealing their data. Contacted by Tech in Asia, Alibaba’s biggest online shopping rival, Jingdong (formerly called 360Buy), declined to reveal numbers. Gloria Li, Jingdong’s senior VP of public relations, did however explain that tens of millions of products will be included in the campaign, with some discounts available from November 1 to 12. She stresses that the sales are a chance to win over customers for life:

What we really want to do – and what is sustainable over the long term – is winning customer trust in areas like guaranteed authentic goods and leveraging the strength of our self-operated delivery service that ensures same day or next day service even when sales volumes shoot up.

Big sales events […] are a chance to get in front of new customers – including some consumers who have not traditionally used e-commerce.

Jingdong is banking on its own warehouse-to-doorstep delivery network to get items to people in good time, avoiding the delays that might hit China’s over-worked and badly stretched third-party delivery companies. Since Alibaba’s e-stores use outsourced logistics, it’s a chance for Jingdong to gain some brownie points with consumers by delivering faster than its arch-rival. Jingdong revealed this month that it now has 100 million registered users.

Keeping up with demand

Whereas Jingdong is an Amazon-like service that buys and ships its own stock from its warehouses, Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall are virtual storefronts for merchants big and small. Those merchants are gearing up for 11/11 already, expecting hundreds of thousands of hits on their own store page.

Brian Lee, a licensed distributor of Elle branded handbags, has a store on Tmall. He explains:

Normally customers have a lot of questions so they use instant messenger [usually Alibaba’s own Aliwang IM] to ask questions about the quality, size and material of the bags. Usually that’s fine, our call center representatives can handle the normal volume of queries. But on November 11 it’s impossible. We expect 200,000 to 400,000 customers viewing the website at the same time and we only usually have only eight to 10 representatives. For 11/11, we hired temporary staff to boost our call center numbers to 20 to 25 and trained them over the past 30 days to answer queries. We also put up a question and answer section about 11/11 to avoid the situation where there are 400,000 people asking 20 representatives questions.

11/11 going beyond China?