As the Double 11 shopping festival gets underway, it spans a wide range of product categories including home appliances, digital devices, apparel, bags, beauty and skincare products, and jewelry, drawing massive numbers of consumers into livestream rooms and smart fitting rooms.
Hong Yong, a think tank expert from the China Digital-Real Economy Integration 50 Forum, said in an interview that the Double 11 shopping festival can effectively unleash consumption potential, helping boost fourth-quarter consumption data and supporting annual consumption expansion and upgrading.
This year's Double 11 shopping festival has displayed new characteristics. E-commerce platforms are generally placing greater emphasis on "stock management" 鈥?that is, activating existing users by demonstrating their strengths, attracting broad participation from merchants and consumers, enhancing user loyalty, and pursuing sustained returns.
The strategies adopted by e-commerce platforms involve both "subtraction" and "addition." On one hand, some platforms have eliminated "cross-store spending thresholds" and "order-stacking mechanisms," replacing them with "official direct discounts," while others have cancelled or shortened presale periods. Overall, discount rules have been significantly simplified, with considerable discounts and convenient coupon-claiming methods.
On the other hand, multiple e-commerce platforms are extending from "selling goods" to "selling services," with automotive maintenance, domestic cleaning, home installation and repair services attracting widespread consumer attention. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) services have become a brand-new consumer category in the Double 11 shopping festival for the first time, allowing consumers to purchase tokens on various e-commerce platforms.
The fundamental reason e-commerce platforms are emphasizing "stock management" is that, against the backdrop of online shopping and coupons having become quite common, the input-output ratio of simply acquiring new users is declining. Deepening engagement with existing users can reduce marketing costs and increase consumer repurchase rates, thereby achieving more stable revenue and profits and strengthening long-term operational capabilities. It is important to note that e-commerce platforms must continue developing toward professional and refined operations to better unlock the value of existing users, said Yang Changlong, a senior investment advisor at Shaanxi Jufeng Investment Information Co., Ltd.
Liu Chunsheng, an associate professor at Central University of Finance and Economics, stated that e-commerce platforms incorporating AI services into the Double 11 shopping festival represents a landmark change in China's service consumption sector. In the long run, AI services are expected to become a new hotspot in service consumption, further driving the optimization and upgrading of the consumption structure and the expansion of the consumer market scale.
At the same time, merchants are adopting a more pragmatic mindset. Merchants on e-commerce platforms are no longer blindly engaging in "cutthroat price wars" or "chasing sales volume." Instead, they are exploring new profit margins through hosting livestreams, offering genuine discounts, launching distinctive products and services, and improving after-sales service efficiency and quality across multiple dimensions.
Consumers are making more rational decisions. Most consumers insist on stocking up according to their actual needs, pursuing a good consumption experience, refusing to blindly hoard goods simply because prices are low, and rejecting impulse purchases that result in wasteful transactions. Product quality, service guarantees, long-term use value, and many other factors are jointly influencing consumers' purchasing decisions.
Hong Yong believes that simpler rules, more diversified supply, and more pragmatic operations are being transformed into new consumption increments. In the future, e-commerce platforms should place greater emphasis on sustainable development, strengthening comprehensive capabilities through multiple dimensions including price transparency, full-chain fulfillment capability, and service standardization, so as to more precisely match online consumption demand and contribute platform strength to consumption expansion and upgrading.
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