Singles Day shopping craze broadens e-commerce's reach

"On Nov. 11, we will, for the first time, launch a global promotion section on Tmall, where Chinese consumers can buy products from different countries and foreign consumers can also order Chinese products on that platform," he said.

Wu Qian, manager of Tmall International, said the platform will bring Singles Day promotions to consumers in countries including Malaysia, Brazil, and Russia this year.

Aliexpress.com, another international shopping platform under Alibaba, announced on October 30 in Brazil that the website would offer discounts of up to 50 percent to Brazilian buyers on November 11, as well as free shipping for some products.

Rural potential

China's vast rural areas are another potential market for online retailers. Statistics provided by Alibaba show that there were 177 million Internet users in China's rural areas in 2013. The company predicted that sales volume in the rural online shopping market may reach 180 billion yuan this year.

The figure may exceed 460 billion yuan in 2016, according to Xie Yang, official with the Development Research Center of the State Council.

However, the rural market for e-commerce is still largely untapped. Lu Zhaoxi, CEO of Alibaba, said about 34 percent of urban residents are engaged in e-commerce, while only 9 percent of people in rural areas use online shopping platforms. He said the company hopes that online shopping will become more popular in the countryside and more farmers will open online stores selling products to customers worldwide.

Alibaba announced last month that it will invest 10 billion yuan to build 1,000 county-level operating centers and 100,000 village-level service stations in the following three to five years.

An anonymous manager of e-commerce company Suning.com said the company has worked out a blueprint for developing its rural market, and it plans to launch at least 10,000 service centers in rural areas, which will cover more than a quarter of the country's townships.

Meng Lili, a villager in Boxing County of Shandong Province, runs an online store selling straw-plaited crafts. She has been especially busy recently, preparing for the upcoming shopping day.

"We received fewer orders than usual in recent days, since many buyers are waiting for the big discounts ahead," she said.

"Last Nov. 11, our sales volume was more than 300,000 yuan. We have to work hard now to make full preparations in order to break last year's record," she said.

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