What is it exactly like to buy stuff online on a 11.11 in China?

Same as every year since 2009, online sales in China on the 11th of November will break a new record. For those of you who lived on another planet, it’s the equivalent of the black Friday in China. Behind this operation, there is a guy called Jack Ma, well-known for being the founder of Alibaba group and singing in a stadium dressed as Michael Jackson in front of thousand of his employees. A tech giant including a way better version of eBay, an incredible payment app, an Amazon web service etc etc.

The service getting most free press coverage is known as Taobao. As media will focus on the 11.11, they will not tell you what’s happening before and after this date on a consumer perpective.

First of all, I don’t have any figures but from what I can see, people that keep buying on Taobao on the 11.11, will stop purchasing anything else up to one month before this date. They just put stuff in their shopping cart and wait. I’d be curious to compare the total of monthly sales of November and May for example. It may completely be the around the same amount.

Another reason you would do this in advance is that do not expect answers from the customer service on the 11.11. They receive so many requests and orders on one day they delay all the shipments. Worse, and it happened to me, they have stock problems or send the wrong products, wrong quantity etc… And if it’s not the seller fault it can be because of the logistics companies that get such an unusual amount of parcels to handle in a short period of time. Something I just noticed today also, on Taobao if you confirm your order but the seller did not ship it yet you can still ask for a refund. SURPRISE : on the 11.11 you cannot, you have to wait for the 12.11 to cancel your order. The result is that so many sellers have already processed orders as shipped to prevent customers to cancel them but I am sure that in practice they only associated a tracking number. We can expect even more packages sent to the wrong address ! YAY !

Last but not least, this year I got a 20 RMB coupon on a 200 RMB product and a 1 RMB coupon on a 11 RMB product. So I estimate my total savings to be around three euros. I do not find prices that interesting but I do not expect Jack Ma to be Santa Claus either. If you want big discount, you need to buy big quantities per seller. Sounds like basic trading rule right?