The Impact of Alibaba’s Single’s Day (Double 11) on Consumers
In the 11th Alibaba's Single's Day, the volume of trade surged to 38.3 billion dollars, while the figure for 2009 was only 7.1 million dollars. There is no doubt that the Double 11 has largely raised consumption desire of Chinese consumers.
Rather than being intended to bring consumers convenience in shopping ways, Taobao now is encouraging shopping. For one hand, benefiting from widely spread of smart phone and the development of mobile internet, Taobao developed a serious of applet these years where users will obtain various kinds of discount by playing game. What's more, if users share this website to his friends through the communication applications, such as QQ and Wechat, they will receive more discounts, which informs more people this promotion campaign and give people implication that people around them are going to buy something in Double 11 and they have to use these discounts to purchase too. That's so called "conformity behavior". For another hand, sellers usually raise the price of merchandise and notice consumers who click into their homepage that there will be a big discount. Asking consumers that add goods to their shopping list so that they can enjoy the discount, merchants will lower the price to normal level on Double 11 on time, which has been witnessed in Nike flagship store in Tianmao by their price chart. Although this behavior is obviously against the rules, merchants have proved that it is an effective way.
A number of people make a clear list about what to buy in advance and writ for a certain day-double 11 to click on placing an order. In conclusion, either applet from Taobao or fake discount, it is possible to say Double 11 has great impacted consumers and raised their desire to buy.
