Alibaba is set to launch new e-commerce campaign
阿里巴巴擴大電子商務生態圈

These days it seems all holidays and festivals we celebrate can be turned into business opportunities. Most of us remember the things we bought online during China's Singles day shopping festival last year which broke all kinds of sales records. And here we go again as China's e-commerce gaint, Alibaba, is set to launch what could be its biggest sales event to date.

China’s largest online shopping platform, Alibaba has launched its biggest e-commerce campaign since last November’s Single’s day shopping bonanza. During the past week, users on Alibaba’s Taobao can buy discount coupons of up to 62% through Taobao apps on their smart phones. The coupons can only be redeemed on Mar. 8th, which is women’s day in China. Alibaba’s campaign aims to create what it calls a "lifestyle festival."

Li Kuankuan, senior PR specialist of Alibaba Group, said, "Alibaba aims to make the lifestyle festival into a mobile equivalent of Single’s day shopping festival. The marketing cost for the event is the sum of our last two shopping festivals combined."

"For this event, Alibaba is cooperating with major shopping malls across eight cities, over 400 Karaoke clubs, movie theatres and up to 800 restaurants. The company is aiming to move from online shopping to offline lifestyle services," Ynag Chengxi, Beijing, said.

"Alibaba has fired its first shot at the online to offline market. Compared to its rivals, Alibaba is much more capable in connecting businesses with customers, because this has always been its strong suit since the beginning," senior analyst of Analysys Sun Mengzi said.

But Alibaba also has reasons to be nervous. The company’s biggest rival Tencent has rapidly gained ground in this market. During Chinese New Year, Tencent attracted millions of people to bind their debit cards to its messaging app Wechat, by allowing Wechat users to send each other red envelopes or traditional cash gifts during the holiday season. This means it completed its first step in the O2O market almost overnight.

"Although Alibaba has a dominant position in the B2C area and a very mature industry chain, Tencent knows how to utilize social networking between users to propel their business. This is a huge advantage," Sun said.

Experts say there is still a huge debate within the industry over which business model will prevail in the future.

YVn=~d8zb-.FwkegdAu7KBU.HKan_*.~-9Xq*SI888VR;