With VR and live streaming, Alibaba’s Singles Day goes hi-tech

Photo credit: Nan Palmero.

If you took every hyped technology from this year and rolled into into one marketing plan, it would look like Alibaba’s Singles Day festivities.

The Chinese tech giant is using live streaming, virtual reality, and a Pokemon Go-like augmented reality game to drive up sales for its mammoth shopping day whose sales eclipse that of both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. What was once a 24-hour online shopping event has now sprawled into weeks of advertising and promotional events, starting as early as three weeks before the actual day on November 11.

This year, Alibaba is boosting its Singles Day spending extravaganza with high-tech marketing campaigns.

Shopping in VR

Browsing baby formula using Alibaba’s VR shopping app Buy+.

Buy+ is Alibaba’s virtual reality shopping app, launched earlier this year. Once you boot up Buy+, which is inside Taobao, Alibaba’s ecommerce site, you’re whizzed into a living room where you can choose different travel destinations, such as Macy’s in Times Square or Chemist Warehouse, a pharmacy in Australia. Depending on where you go, the app will take you on a short journey to the store. In Times Square, for example, a guy drives you down Broadway Street in a retro-style red car.

Once you’re inside the store, you can navigate the ground via arrow buttons. Shiny, teal circles mark items that you can click for product information, including a spinning, three-dimensional view of the item. That’s where you can add items to your shopping cart.

The experience looks pretty glossy in Alibaba’s promo video, but it feels more like a PR stunt than a product that will actually be useful to customers. It’s high-tech for the sake of high-tech. Even though Alibaba claims you can use any headset for Buy+ – Taobao sells cardboard headsets for as little as US$1 – in reality, you’ll need a special headset that lets you click to navigate through shopping malls and make purchases. Or you can drop the VR headset entirely and wave your phone around.

Ultimately, Alibaba’s VR shopping is less enjoyable and more annoying than the physical act of browsing in a store. But hey… you’re in virtual reality.

Jack Ma’s company has also created its own Pokemon Go-style game for the annual shopping event. Instead of cute Pokemon, however, expect to chase Alibaba’s cat mascot for online marketplace Tmall. According to the tech giant’s blog, Alizila, consumers will be able to catch Tmall’s cat mascot in both “offline and online environments” to earn prizes from merchants like Shanghai Disneyland and Starbucks.

See now, buy now

If you’ve ever wanted a bright red leotard, now’s your chance. Models strut their stuff at Alibaba’s “See Now, Buy Now” event. Photo credit: Alibaba Group.

Alibaba has been exploiting the live streaming buzz on Taobao since May, when it launched its own live broadcasting platform called Taobao Live. Singles Day is just another reason to pump it up.