No Mind-Blowing Growth for Singles Day 2022

“In terms of communications from the platform companies around the festival, there’s been a shift away from celebrating excessive consumption and emphasizing gross merchandise value (GMV),” Jacob Cooke, the CEO of e-commerce consultancy WPIC Marketing + Technologies, told Tech Asia. “The shift has been going on for a few years now, and that’s related to common prosperity, the anti-monopoly drive,” he added, referring to President Xi Jinping’s ongoing drive to curb the influence of big tech.

Singles Day started as a one-day event but has morphed into an 18-day online campaign. This year’s Singles Day featured over 290,000 brands from over 90 countries and regions across 7,000 product categories.

“The Shanghai lockdown early this year dramatically impacted 618. Understandably, the Shanghai consumers, as well as the whole country had a huge trauma from such an unexpected harsh reaction, hence were suffering PTSD,” shared Elisa Harca, co-founder and Asia CEO of marketing agency Red Ant. “However, we are pleased to see that consumer appetite for shopping has recovered somewhat, and 11.11 for most brands we work with was positive. Most of the brands met their 11.11 targets, or were close enough to doing so to help them feel positive about leaning in to 2023.”