Sales performance of Taiwanese e-commerce players on Saturday set new records last weekend, thanks to Taiwanese interest in the annual Singles’ Day shopping festival that originated in China in the 1990s.
TV and online retailer Momo.com Inc (富邦媒) said revenue skyrocketed 150 percent year-on-year to NT$740 million (US$24.51 million) on Singles’ Day, also known as “Double 11” for the Nov. 11 date, from NT$300 million on the same day last year.
The NT$740 million is 10 times higher than its average daily revenue, setting a new record for a daily high, Momo.com said, adding that online visitors on Saturday jumped 56.25 percent annually to reach 7.5 million.
Momo.com said the largest purchase on that day was NT$2.4 million and the second-biggest buy was more than NT$1 million. The company declined to disclose the products, saying it would be a violation of customer privacy.
“The festive atmosphere for Singles’ Day is much stronger in Taiwan this year, as more e-commerce operators are joining the annual shopping festival and are stepping up marketing efforts,” Momo.com president Lin Chi-feng (林啟峰) told a media gathering at the beginning of this month.
Momo.com said it integrated its online and offline resources by convening a 10-hour marketing event in Xinyi District on Saturday, inviting 11 Taiwanese celebrities to live-stream promotions of discounted products displayed on the event stage.
PChome Online Inc (網路家庭), the nation’s largest online shopping portal operator, joined the shopping festival for the first time this year.
PChome invited singers, such as South Korea’s Hyeon-a and Taiwan’s Show Luo (羅志祥), for a three-hour Singles’ Day event from 9pm to midnight Friday night and broadcast the show on its Web site and its social network accounts.
PChome said the number of new members registered on Friday was five times higher than its daily average and that the number of purchases tripled its daily average. The company declined to reveal exact figures.
PChome subsidiary PChomestore Inc (商店街) said that orders on Saturday broke the company’s daily order record — 430,000 — and that revenue ballooned 600 percent compared with the same day last year.
TV shopping operator Eastern Home Shopping & Leisure Co Ltd (EHS, 東森購物) said its sales on Saturday increased by 80 percent compared with the same day a year ago and represented a quadruple jump over its daily sales.
EHS attributed the strong growth to the increasing popularity of the Singles’ Day shopping event in Taiwan.
“The fact that Singles’ Day this year happened to be on a weekend also gave consumers more time to shop,” the company said in a statement.
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