Shopping day is coming, again！II

By L'Atelier - Shanghai

It took more time than usual to buy a sandwich in 7-ELEVEn, and a girl before me bought a bag of goods in the convenience store at the 9:30 which is more unusual. I haven't realized it's the Double Twelve until that girl check out with hers Alipay Wallet with some discount. When I checked out, the half price surprised me even just saved 4 yuan.

It is written by Hanna Chen, Analyst Consultant of L'Atelier Asia

I was wandering what strategies would e-commerce giants use for the special day this year. When I saw the banner on Taobao's home page and receive the message from Tmall stores which once shopping, I thought it's still the online promotion; When I saw the fight tickets ads in Ali Travel App, I thought they will meet the needs of the Spring Festival travel peak. What I neglect is Alipay bar code payment, which I already tried but didn't expect as a main strength in the shopping battle.

From the data Ali released, about 20,000 offline merchants (100 brands) participated in the promotion, which including restaurants, bakeries, convenience stores, supermarkets, taxis and vending machines. Until 3:30 pm, 4.04 million deals were made in the offline merchants, big cities like Shanghai, Wuhan, Beijing and Hangzhou ranked top four in terms of deal numbers.

Even Alipay's pos business was once suspended in the summer 2013, it's offline expansion is never end. Bank cards, especially credit cards, are more used by Chinese people. From my observation, however, people prefer to use it when purchasing high value goods, but not a bottle of water. The strict signature requirement is always an obstacle while the card safety issues are often on the news. A quick way for micropayment is needed. With 10 years accumulation, Alipay already got more than 300 million users and 190million on mobile. With such huge customer base and trusts, Alipay started its password-free micropayment. The only thing they need to do is establishing consumer behavior of mobile payment, then here's the double twelve offline promotion.

The O2O concept has been popular for some time, but it will last for more years, cause the fight for market is just start.