Companies eye Black Friday sales bonanza

Major online retailers are looking to cash in on the Black Friday shopping spree, which falls on Nov 29 this year, and formed partnerships with each other as more Chinese consumers scout for high-quality products from abroad.

Amazon Global Store, the cross-border shopping platform of tech behemoth Amazon.com Inc, has launched a pop-up store on social commerce site Pinduoduo Inc, and plans to operate it through the end of December.

The pop-up store offers Chinese customers a selection of about 1,000 overseas products from Nintendo Switch consoles, Australian baby formula to personal care products.

With Amazon Global Store's strengths in high-quality imported products in China and Pinduoduo's large customer base, Amazon is looking forward to enabling customers to enjoy cross-border shopping through this store.

In July, Amazon shut down its third-party seller services on its Chinese online marketplace amid increasingly fierce competition from homegrown e-commerce rivals such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and JD, as well as Pinduoduo.

Black Friday, the start of the Christmas shopping season, is a major shopping day featuring the highest discounts all year round and is a bonanza for brick-and-mortar retailers, e-commerce players and consumers from around the world.

An increasing number of Chinese consumers have participated in the global shopping festival, since Amazon China brought Black Friday to China in 2014.

Tmall Global, the cross-border e-commerce platform owned by tech heavyweight Alibaba, has kicked off its cross-border cold chain delivery service for Black Friday promotion, and will provide more than 2,500 blue-chip brands from more than 70 countries around the world.

More than 40 well-known brands will launch their new and exclusive products, and lab-grown meat will make its debut in the domestic market, the e-commerce heavyweight said.

In September, Alibaba announced it acquired NetEase Kaola, the cross-border e-commerce platform of NetEase Inc for $2 billion, to bolster its efforts to cater to local demand for quality products from abroad.

Alibaba's Tmall Global and Net-Ease Kaola took up 27.7 percent and 25.1 percent of the country's cross-border e-commerce market respectively in the first half of this year, followed by JD Worldwide (13.3 percent), JD's cross-border commerce unit, and Vipshop International (9.9 percent), according to consultancy iiMedia Research.

JD also invested in online discount retailer Vipshop Holdings Ltd to tap more female shoppers in 2017.

Ymatou, a Shanghai-based cross-border e-commerce site, said its sales revenue surpassed 100 million yuan ($14.2 million) in just 116 seconds when it started its Black Friday shopping carnival on Nov 22. It has collaborated with Fenqile, an installment e-commerce platform under Nasdaq-listed LexinFintech, to offer credit services.

"E-commerce platforms hope to tap the huge consumption potential from the Chinese market. It is noteworthy that the tie-up between Amazon and Pinduoduo will help Amazon tap the massive annual active buyers on Pinduoduo's app," said Mo Daiqing, an analyst at the China E-Commerce Research Center.

The competition in the cross-border e-commerce sector will be more intense, as more and more Chinese consumers tend to buy high-quality goods from overseas through online retailers, Mo said, adding each player wants to get a bigger slice of the pie.

Chen Tao, an analyst with Beijingbased internet consultancy Analysys, said Black Friday is still smaller compared with China's homegrown Singles Day shopping extravaganza.