Report: Beauty, cleaning products top shopping choices for Nov 11

Employees of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd play with a mascot at the company's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Friday. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Beauty, personal care and home cleaning products are expected to be the most popular items purchased during the Singles Day shopping festival, a retail research said.

Moreover, the shopping gala often leads to repeated purchases and can boost traffic to offline stores, according to the research.

The research, conducted by Kantar Worldpanel China, forecasts that about 30 percent of urban families in China would purchase fast moving consumer goods during the Nov 11 shopping festival this year.

The ratio was 23 percent in 2016 and 13 percent in 2015.

There are 56 percent more people shopping online during November than during the rest of the year and the spending per shopping time during this month is 5 percent more than the average in a year, the research found.

Tmall was the top online shopping platform for beauty products last year, taking up 35.3 percent of the consumption, followed by JD.com at 11 percent and VIP.com at 7.3 percent.

"It is a great chance for beauty brands to attract new consumers, given the traffic brought by the festival and the promotional scale," said Liu Biding, an analyst of Kantar Worldpanel China.

More importantly, in the nine months following the November shopping festival, about 51 percent of the consumers who tried the product for the first time will repurchase the product, the research said, adding that foundation and lipstick are what consumers would most likely purchase again.