Chinese e-commerce platforms see strong sales for 618 shopping festival

Multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms notched record-breaking transaction volumes in the 618 mid-year shopping festival this year, reflecting rising consumption potential as well as upbeat economic momentum.

On e-commerce platform JD.com, 83 brands achieved a cumulative transaction volume exceeding 1 billion yuan ($137.80 million) during the shopping festival, and more than 150,000 small and medium-sized merchants saw a 50 percent increase in sales, according to a statement sent from the company to the Global Times on Wednesday.

New-energy products saw strong growth, with the transaction volume of electric vehicle charging stations increasing by more than 120 percent year-on-year. The transaction volume of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware products - such as AI computers, AI mobile phones, AI keyboards and mouses, and AI learning devices - increased by 150 percent year-on-year, said the statement.

As of 12 am on June 19, a total of 365 brands on Tmall had passed the 100-million-yuan mark in gross merchandise volume (GMV) during the shopping festival, the company told the Global Times, adding that over 36,000 brands doubled their GMV. A total of 1.9 million small and medium-sized enterprises on Taobao achieved GMV growth of more than 100 percent. Nearly 30,000 merchants generated GMV of more than 1 million yuan.

Multiple international brands such as Apple, Nike, L'Oréal, Lanc?me, Adidas and Estee Lauder saw their GMV surpass 100 million yuan on Tmall during the shopping festival.

Livestreaming played an important role in merchandise promotion. JD.com's statement showed that orders placed on JD Live during livestream sales events increased by more than 200 percent. The number of Taobao's livestreaming channels generating GMV of more than 100 million yuan increased by 53 percent year-on-year.

Data from the e-commerce branch of Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu showed that as of June 18, the orders placed on its livestreaming channels surged by 5.4 times, and the volume of consumers making purchases on livestreaming channels surged by 5.2 times, according to media reports.

The rapid development of livestreaming has driven the expansion of online consumption scenarios, with online retail sales rising by 12.4 percent to 5.77 trillion yuan over the period, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on June 17, 2024.

In April, the Ministry of Commerce and 13 other government departments rolled out specific measures to facilitate and encourage trade-ins of consumer goods. In the first five months of the year, the nation's retail sales grew by 4.1 percent to 19.52 trillion yuan, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

The 618 shopping spree provides an important window on new consumption trends, and it's also a barometer of China's consumer market, observers said.