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Published on Dec. 10, 2013
Online merchants this week are preparing for Taobao Marketplace’s annual 12.12 online sale, the less-heralded aftershock to Taobao and Tmall’s 11.11 Shopping Festival that set global e-commerce sales records last month.
The 12.12 sale, slated to take place on Thursday, is held by Taobao Marketplace every year to support the website’s small online vendors. More than 5 million vendors, many of them mom-and-pop operators, form the foundation of Taobao’s C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace. Many of these micro-merchants are sidelined during the 11.11 festival because they sell low-demand, niche products. They also tend to lack the manpower to handle heavy sales volumes and their financial situations prevent them from offering the deep discounts needed to compete against deeper-pocketed e-tailers during China’s biggest online shopping day of the year.
Unlike the 11.11 (Singles’ Day) sale, on 12.12 Taobao merchants are not required to offer some items at half the regular price in order to participate. They just need to ensure that the prices of goods enrolled in the sale are the lowest they’ve offered in the past 30 days. The website says 2 million sellers have registered to participate.
Taobao Marketplace is nonetheless drumming up enthusiasm with a marketing campaign touting the extensive bargains expected for 12.12. According to Taobao some 60 million items will be available for half price, with an additional RMB 1.2 billion worth of discounts given by online stores in the form of “red packets,” or digital coupons.
To provide more help for micro-merchants, Taobao late last month said it would provide smaller vendors with free tools for sales-data analysis which could help them better reach the right consumers and attract buyers to their sites by handing out discount vouchers geared to individuals’ shopping behaviors. “Our target is to allow more small but high quality vendors to grow on our platform,” said Zhang Yu, president of Taobao.com, according to a Xinhua report.
For this year’s 12.12 sale, Taobao Marketplace is highlighting some unusual products that are available on the site, including a specialmarketplacefor elderly Chinese consumers offering products such as pill boxes and nail-clippers equipped with magnifying glasses.
Meanwhile, in the two weeks leading up to the sale, Taobao has been promoting a series of offbeat online auctions, among them the sale of 16 thoroughbred racehorses imported from the U.S. and Saudia Arabia, including a horse said to have been ridden by late U.S. president Ronald Reagan that has appeared in TV shows.
Also up for auction will be 684 gold bars, bricks and ornaments, and a slew of items seized by various provincial courts, from smartphones to luxury cars to real estate. The most expensive item on the auction block is a factory owned by a sanitary ware company that carries starting pricetag of 51 million yuan ($8.3 million).
