35 Billion in One Day, But Not All Good News For Alibaba

35 billion (35.019 billion yuan exactly) is the trading volume of Alibaba’s on Double Eleven’s Day of 2013. While people from Alibaba are still celebrating, here’re a few things Huxiu think we all should give a note:

Two Rising Trends

Mobile Commerce - The total sales of mobile Taobao on Double Eleven’s Day hit 5.35 billion yuan, which is 5.6 times the sales of last year (9.6 hundred million yuan). The amount of daily active users on Double Eleven reached 127 million. The transactions made through Taobao’s mobile platform took up to 21% of the total trades, which amount to about 35.9 million deals.

O2O - Alibaba teamed up with more than 30,000 stores, including the Intime Retail (银泰百货), in this year’s “11.11” promotional event. Autonavi (高德地图), the digital mapping company in which Alibaba strategically invested, also provided services to the “11.11” promotional event.

Tmall Rules, the Rivals Improves

While a great portion of the total sales on Tmall comes from apparels and accessories, Tmall’s performance in the other product categories, especially in electronic appliances, digital products, mobile products and home supplies, are not as impressive as expected. It is believed that the consumers’ demands for these products were already satisfied by Suning (苏宁), JD.com (京东) and Yixun.com (易迅网). Thanks to their advantages in procurement scales and self-built logistics systems, these rivals of Alibaba had already started making profits before Tmall’s “11.11” promotional event ever started.

During last year’s “11.11” promotional event, Tmall made quite a buzz through the pre-sale event of its household appliances. Yet this year, the only highlights in the electronic category are the performances of Xiaomi (小米) and Haier (海尔), which are the only two electronics brands whose sales exceeded a hundred million yuan during the “11.11” promotional event.

Facing Tmall’s aggressive expansion, the other online B2C retailers are currently defending well. At this point Tmall has no significant advantage over its competitors in the product categories which rely highly on the logistics, warehousing and services.