Singles’ Day’s enormous sales brought Alibaba a dose of criticism and controversy earlier this week regarding false advertising, but China’s e-commerce giant has also had another massive shopping event to handle: 12.12.
Promoted by Alipay, the payment system under Ant Financial, an arm of the Alibaba Group, December 12 is a shopping event that extends offline, allowing shoppers to use Alipay to receive discounts in participating international shops.
E-commerce giants like Taobao and JD.com offer deals as well, but the focus of the event centers more around doing activities outside of the home, such as eating out, going to the movies, and, of course, shopping at the mall.
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Last year, the event saw the participation of around 300,000 offline merchants, up from 20,000 the year before. Many of these participants are international retailers in efforts to target China’s outbound travelers.
Alipay’s event is growing quickly. This year, more than 110 million consumers participated in its 12.12 event, up from around just more than 28 million last year.
To get to this point, the payment company has been making major efforts in the past year to work with international retailers to capitalize on China’s growing outbound tourism market.
In China, meanwhile, Alipay is going head to head with WeChat Pay, a service that’s increasingly seeing cooperation from major luxury retailers, and most recently, Starbucks.