China’s second largest e-commerce giant, JD.com has announced Tuesday morning a whopping RMB159.2 billion (approximately USD$25 billion) worth of orders to close its annual mid-year ‘618’ online shopping festival, JD’s counterpart to Alibaba’s year-end ‘Singles Day’ shopping festival.
This shopping festival runs for the first 18 days of the month of June. The cumulative value of delivered orders this year witnessed a 37% increase from last year’s festival sales.
In addition to online sales, as the concept of “new retail” – a coined term for online and offline channels integration – now prevails in the industry, JD also tapped offline channels to join the festival this year, by collaborating with more than 500,000 physical stores for a “Boundless Carnival”.
The physical channels, included Walmart, Yonghui and Better Life supermarket chains, all recorded several times higher sales on JD’s on-demand services platform JD Daojia (京东到家) on June 18.
Tencent and JD invested in or partnered up with these supermarkets as the combination is looking to compete with Alibaba on the new retail front, a trend currently led by Alibaba as the Hangzhou-based ecommerce group explores to combine online technologies and user traffic with offline channels and services.
Furthermore, in line with another growing ‘social e-commerce’ trend, JD has also attracted more than 360 million participants via its launch ofaround 300 social interactive games on both the WeChat platform and the mobile QQ platform.
However, the achievement of JD’s mid-year shopping gala looks a bit lackluster when it’s compared to Alibaba’s ‘Singles Day’ sales of last year.
Unlike JD, its ‘Singles Day’ took a mere 1 day last November to rake in the same $25 billion haul – far surpassing the total sales of $6.79 billion for Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined in the U.S.
The ‘618’ announcement came in the wake of Google’s 500 million investment into JD in exchange for less than 1% stake in the latter, as we reported yesterday.
Editor: Ben Jiang
