Over 300 million parcels handled on Dec 12 shopping festival

A total of 322 million parcels were generated on major e-commerce platforms on Dec 12, a shopping frenzy just a month after the Singles Day festival, data from China's State Post Bureau showed.

That marked an increase of 32.5 percent over the same period last year and setting a new high.

Dec 12 is the second-busiest time for the logistic sector behind Double 11, or the Singles Day.

During this year's Singles Day shopping festival (Nov 11-16), the whole industry picked up 1.88 billion parcels, up 25.8 percent year-on-year.

Although consumers are not excited about the Dec 12 as Nov 11, partly due to less strong sales promotion, major e-commerce platforms, including Taobao, Tmall, JD, Pinduoduo and NetEase Kaola, still participated this shopping gala.

In order to deal with the Dec 12 demand, courier companies had put their preparatory work in full gear, to make sure the parcels arrived in time.

According to data from Ele.me Koubei, 100,000 boxes of Zhouheiya food, which is best known for its spicy duck's neck, 2.5 tons of cherries, 60,000 Pizza Hut steaks and pizzas were sold out via the Koubei app in half an hour after the Double 12 event was launched.

Alibaba announced in October it had merged two of its food review and delivery-related businesses－Ele.me and Koubei－to better compete with Tencent -backed Meituan-Dianping.