Instead of duplicating Double 11 shopping festival on a different date, this year’s Double 12 focused on off-line retail sales led by Alipay.
Double 11 (Nov 11) and Double 12 (Dec 12) are the two popular online shopping campaigns in China. This year, discounts and products promotions are extended offline purchase, which motivated a lot of elderly consumers in China. Take a look at the photos below and get a sense of how successful the offline campaign was:
The attractive offers and promotions are available when you pay with Alipay. Unlike online product promotions, you can see, touch and get a real sense of the discounted goods. There were some who were outside the supermarket helping the elderly smartphone users to set up mobile payment gateway, charging five yuan per set-up.
However, Alipay’s co-promotion with retailers agitated some shoppers as they need to queue for a few hours just buy some regular goods. With thousands of shoppers trying to access to data network and free Wi-fi, the transaction is much slower than it usually is if not failing to connect, making the shopping experience much worse. Some shoppers abandoned the order as the promotion expired at 10pm:
Nonetheless, Alipay secured tens of millions of mobile app activation on one single day according to news on Weibo; in addition, it cultivates the mobile shopping habits among the elderly.
From online side, mobile shopping continued to rise representing 45.8% of total Taobao transactions on Dec 12 2014, comparing with 42.6% on Double 11.
