Singles’ Day, which takes place annually on November 11, has become the biggest 24-hour online shopping event globally. This year, Alibaba posted a 26% increase in gross merchandise volume from last year, totalling to USD 38.4 billion. Besides expanding the number of discounted items and featuring the mega-celeb Taylor Swift, the retailer put emphasis on its live-streaming to encourage purchase.
Live-streaming commerce has now expanded to Southeast Asia (SEA), as Lazada, Shopee and Rakuten already launched the feature, successfully. With the wins seen from these retailers coupled with the growing e-commerce market in the region, Singles’ Day outdoes itself year-on-year.
In this report, we reviewed the biggest fashion e-commerce player in SEA, Zalora, during Singles’ Day to draw insights on its performance compared with last year. Data was taken from the three biggest countries based on Singles’ Day assortment size – Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. With Australia increasingly influenced by SEA, we have also analysed data from one of its largest retailers, The Iconic, to understand the market’s reception. More than 800,000 data points were tracked from November 1 to 14.
All data used in this report comes from products retailing online, as tracked by Omnilytics, unless otherwise mentioned.
With assortment up almost 100% for 11.11 2019, Zalora managed to drive more than 130% sell-out collectively from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore saw the most significant increase in total sell-out count compared to last year, which was attributed to a big jump in number of discounted items. Despite showing improvement in sell-out from last year, of the three, Indonesia had the lowest sell-out even with 80% of items being discounted on that day.
Sell-out at discounted price increased 2x compared with last year, while full price sell-out saw a jump of 3x. Full price sell-out also skyrocketed by 5x compared with the average sell-out at full price a week before 11.11. This reveals an opportunity for retailers to drive full price products.
The number of products discounted for the first time this year also increased by more than 100% against last year.
Similar to 2018, womenswear continued to be the key sales driver during Singles’ Day. Even with Zalora’s recent venture into kidswear in October, the womenswear segment still contributed to more than 70% of total sell-out. However, Singapore showed a lower contribution in womenswear this year (67%) compared with its neighbouring countries. This was mainly driven by a higher sell-out contribution in menswear, which jumped from 25% in 2018 to 30% in 2019. This signals the importance of the menswear segment in this country.
Similar to last year, Zalora kickstarted its Singles’ Day campaign in 2019 as early as November 1. This year, its campaign called ‘Spin & Win’ tried to attract consumers with gift cards and special discount codes by spinning the wheel game. As a result, this year’s sell-out started at a slightly higher base compared to last year but dipped over the next two days, before picking up again on November 4.
Sell-out grew steadily moving into 11.11, with an average of 30% increase day-to-day against last year. However, the key promotional dates, where Zalora started to aggressively promote on timely flash sale on November 8 and 10, saw a 16% and 41% decrease respectively against last year.
From Chart 3, consumers evidently tried to hold off purchases as they anticipated 11.11. The Singles’ Day total sell-out skyrocketed by 81% from the previous day, which also constituted a 132% jump from 2018.
The subsequent chapters deep dive into the factors contributing to the performance of each country.
Out of the three countries, Indonesia was the most aggressive in its discounting strategy this year. Its discounted items contribution was higher than Malaysia and Singapore, averaging around 73% vs. 63% throughout the sale period. It kickstarted the Singles’ Day campaign on November 1 by marking down 65% of its items and gradually increased to 80% on November 11 (Chart 5). The majority (21%) of items were also marked down deeper than last year leading to 11.11, at 50-59% off. However, its performance paled in comparison to Malaysia and Singapore despite its aggressive markdown strategy, which only resulted in 2% sell-out rate.
Malaysia adopted a relatively shallow discounting strategy, unlike Indonesia. Most (22%) of the discounted items were marked down at 50-59% off in 2018. However, the most common discount range for this year was kept at 20-29% off on the week before Singles’ Day and went on a slightly deeper discount on 11.11 itself, at 30-39% off. Despite being less aggressive in the discounting strategy, it was still proven successful as sell-out count jumped more than 100% against last year.
Similar to Malaysia, Singapore had nearly 60% of its items on discount on November 1 and gradually increased to 70% by November 11. It kept the discount at 30-39% from November 8 to 11, as it did last year. Even with the same markdown strategy, it managed to garner 150% more sell-out than last year, which was the biggest jump out of the three countries.
On top of the already marked down prices, Zalora also used limited-time promotional codes of different values to generate traffic and hype throughout the entire campaign period. Besides the ‘Spin & Win’ game, these promotional codes were communicated via newsletters and on the site landing pages.
Malaysia and Singapore had similar promotions in terms of value, brand and category offerings. Indonesia on the other hand offered slightly lower discount values during the entire campaign period.
Overall, the promotional codes offered on 11.11 this year were on a first come, first served basis, whereby the different discount values were capped to a limited number of users. In 2018, all consumers were generously offered 31% off discount code but for a limited time period.
