Alibaba is working to establish a new e-commerce shopping tradition in China with its inaugural ‘Ali Chinese New Year Shopping Festival’.
The leading Chinese e-tailer is hoping to boost sales ahead of the Chinese New Year on 8 February with promotions across its e-commerce sites and a particular focus on reaching rural consumers.
The Chinese New Year promotions kicked off with presales on 14 January, with the five-day festival beginning on 17 January, reports the Alibaba news site Alizila.
“Chinese New Year is the most significant celebration through the year and is a time to maintain traditions,” said Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang. “We aim to enable rural customers to access an extensive range of New Year goods from home and abroad, while making agriculture products from rural China more available among urban customers.”
On the cards for promotions are products both from China as well as brands from overseas, with Alibaba subsidiary Rural Taobao to host a wealth of promotions to extend the sales to rural China and offer rural farmers the chance to sell their produce to consumers across the country.
Alibaba's cross-country shopping site Tmall will also hold promotions on its 'country pavilions' offering specialty products from eight nations, while eight international retailers including Costco and Metro will also take part in the Chinese New Year promotions.
The festival has been designed to boost rural economies, according to Alibaba founder Jack Ma, with an app launched to allow migrant workers who won’t be able to return home for the festival to purchase goods for faraway family members. Alibaba is also working with local governments to organise free trains so migrant workers can return home, free Chinese opera performances in rural towns, and dinners for the elderly and disabled people, among other initiatives.
Alibaba has hopes the Chinese New Year shopping festival will follow in the success of its '11.11 Global Shopping Festival’ for Singles Day in China, which has becoming the world’s largest online shopping event, last year seeing US$14.3bn in sales over 24 hours on 11 November.
“The 11.11 Shopping Festival is designed for netizens,” Ma explained, “while the Chinese New Year Shopping Festival is created for farmers.”
