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Alibaba, the world's largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses, has kicked off its annual Singles’ Day Shopping Festival.
Known as the Alibaba 11.11 Global Shopping Festival or Singles’ Day due to the recurring number of 1s in the date, it is taking place today dated 11 November.
Last year, nearly 100,000 merchants participated in a global shopping event, with consumers spending over $18.2 billion during a 24-hour period.
Alibaba 11.11 has become the largest online and mobile hopping festival in the world by being 18 times bigger than Amazon Prime Day and 2.5 times bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
Alibaba introduced 'New Retail' for this year's Festival. It is a drive to integrate online and offline shopping experiences together.
It collaborated with 52 shopping malls to set up 60 New Retail-powered pop-up stores across 12 cities in China.
New Retail includes augmented reality trials such as a customer visiting a cosmetic brand's pop-up store and experiencing an AR lipstick trial.
About 1,00,000 stores in China are converted into ‘smart stores' with features such as facial recognition payment.
Currently, e-commerce makes up 18 per cent of total retail in China. And this is expected to grow at a CAGR of 23 per cent until 2020, according to RedSeer Consulting.
This year's 11.11 will further show the potential for the growth of e-commerce in that country.