Live shopping isn’t coming — it’s already here

Singles Day, the annual Chinese shopping festival that happens on November 11th, kicked off this year on October 21st. It might sound strange for a one day festival to start 3 weeks early, but Singles Day has grown into a nearly month long shopping season with multiple presales events that are celebrated throughout China and even in Southeast Asia and parts of Europe.
And in regions where it’s not celebrated, Singles Day is still closely watched because of the record setting sales volumes it generates. For example in 2019, Singles Day resulted in more parcels shipped (1.66 billion) than there are people in China. Alibaba alone sold over $38 billion worth of merchandise on Singles Day. That was more than 4 times the volume that every company in the US generated on Cyber Monday combined, which added up to a comparatively meager $9.4 billion in sales. Read more…