Explore the 2016 online-shopping season at GDUFS

     November is the season for shopping: While the afterheat of the crazy shopping carnival on Double 11 day has not faded, yet another wave of selling and buying just took place on Black Friday. Most often customers can find quite good bargains when buying a discounted product or purchasing during the sales. For great variety and constantly updated product list, Chinese online shopping websites are attractive for shoppers from all over the world, including the international students and staff at GDUFS. After all, it’s very difficult to resist the pleasure of shopping. Let’s review and have a glimpse of the shopping spree people enjoy.

※Global Shopping Festival & The Singles Day

On November 11th, also known as the Singles Day and Global Shopping Festival, topics of chitchatting concentrate on “What did you buy?” “Which shop did you opt to buy from” and so on. Folks begin to complain about the late arrival of their packages and it’s an impressive sight as packages surge and accumulate until they’re stacked up like dunes and low mountains, and you can see people wander around hoping desperately to pick out the right package, like people collecting shells carefully on a sandy beach.

   Associating Singles Day with the Global Shopping Festival had been a sort of novelty until 2009 when the online retailer put forward the idea and turned it into a sales event. Since it started eight years ago by e-commerce giant Alibaba, Singles Day seems to have lost its original meaning of symbolizing singleness and changed to an online shopping extravaganza, which has become huger and huger – marking Chinese consumers’ biggest annual shopping spree.

  With abundant advertisements and sufficient hype surrounding our ambient environment creating a feverish atmosphere, there is hardly a chance for you to not get involved in it, unless you are secluded from the Internet and advertisers never fail to draw your attention by giving you big discounts, or sometimes sending you some free samples to try or holding exciting lucky draw activities.

     On the early morning of the Double 11 Day, people stay by their computers or hold their phones closely, clicking on websites, browsing through the Internet and Apps (mainly Tao Bao, Jing Dong, Wei Pin Hui etc.) with gusto, comparing the price in different shops, checking comments carefully, adding many items to their shopping carts which stores the items waiting for payment, and eventually after an exhausting process, they clear up their shopping carts. Afterwards, they go to bed with exultation and expectation wearing a triumphant smile. The next day, they just can’t wait to chatter about this process with their friends and share the joy of indulging their shopping desires and sorrow resulting from not being able to buy things.

※Black Friday

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, which has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., and most major retailers open very early (and more recently during overnight hours) and offer promotional sales. Compared to the Double 11 Day, Black Friday in the U.S. focuses more on big sales in-store, rather than on-line stores. That’s why the picture of people waiting in a huge long line is always used as a poster of Black Friday.

However, on Black Friday, loads of good bargains were posted on WeChat Moments by shopping agents living overseas. Especially for GDUFS’s exchange students studying abroad, Black Friday is a good chance to “daigou”, which means ferrying goods from abroad. Best brands of handbags, clothes and electric products in U.S. with low prices were a strong appeal to students. What’s more, the four biggest malls in the U.S. – Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Saks 5 Avenue and Macy – offer direct delivery service from the U.S. to China, which means it becomes more and more convenient for customers in China to buy products from overseas websites.

※Interesting buzzwords associated with the shopping bonanza

   Soon after the shopping spree began, "eat soil" became a buzzword on the Internet. The term means that consumers spend so much on Singles Day shopping that they don’t have any pennies left in their pockets for food; as a result, they can only "eat soil", which is free.

     “Chopping off hands” is another popular term originating from the 2015 Global Shopping Festival, which means people can’t help themselves when buying things as if they were dressed in the Red Shoes to stop themselves from feeling regretful and guilty for such a cost. Afterwards, they wish they could chop off their hands to prevent themselves from shopping anymore.

※Busy Express Service

 According to the data given by Alibaba, people spent 120 billion on shopping this Singles Day. It is a huge data, let alone other turnover achieved at other websites. It may account for the impressive view you get outside the canteen which were abuzz with people coming around to fetch their packages, large and small. The e-commerce industry has spawned and gives oxygen to the unique express industry. As turnover rises higher and higher, the express industry has seen a great development at high speeds, and express companies also embark on a spree when the online-shopping festival comes.

Mountains of Express Parcels near Canteen 1

  Undoubtedly, online-shopping is becoming an indispensable part of students’ lives. For those who spent too much in Double 11 Day, take time to refill your wallet: Less than one month after Double 11 Day, online shopping platforms put the ads about shopping campaigns on the homepage. For any special day? If double 12 included.

12.12 Spree Again