Alibaba, Xiaohongshu tout sales growth in China’s midyear e-commerce festival
- Sales performance during the 618 shopping festival is closely watched by investors as an indicator of a company’s competitiveness
Alibaba Group Holding said it is seeing “encouraging” user engagement and merchant growth during the 618 midyear online shopping festival, as rival Xiaohongshu, China’s answer to Instagram, said its online sales have tripled from a year ago.
Taobao and Tmall Group, Alibaba’s domestic e-commerce unit, has switched to a new strategy that focuses on consumers and small merchants during this year’s festival, which runs from May 20 to June 20, as the company seeks to defend its dominant position in China’s online shopping market.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Xiaohongshu, a social media app that lets users share lifestyle and travel content, has seen its e-commerce turnover triple during the festival by encouraging influencers to test out live-streaming e-commerce, the company said. Orders placed through the platform’s live-streaming sessions from May 19 to June 10 jumped more than five times from last year, it said.
Neither Alibaba nor Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book, disclosed their gross merchandise value (GMV), a measure of total online sales in a given period.
Sales performance during 618, the country’s second-largest online sales season after Singles’ Day in the fourth quarter, is closely watched by analysts and investors as an indicator of a company’s competitiveness in a cutthroat market.
