Singles Day remains an unloved ploy for retailers in the West

Tomorrow is Singles Day, a sort of Valentine’s Day for single people, but don’t panic if you forgot to do the necessary self-gifting – even in the frenzied ecommerce boom we are living through, there are plenty of sites capable of next-day delivery. And if your choice of indulgence shows up late or isn’t quite what you hoped it would be, you can always go through the motions of beaming as you thank yourself in a strangled voice.

Black Friday and its uncool cousin Cyber Monday put on a good show, but it is Singles Day that holds the title of the world's biggest online shopping day, and yet retailers outside China and parts of southeast Asia are surprisingly shy about using it as a ready-made hook for another shakedown. In Ireland, Singles Day is just a quirky annual business story – one that just happens to involve an outlay of tens of billions of other people's money. For record-breaking splurges on non-essential items on November 11th, you have to look east.

There is a rapidly ageing but still quite good joke about what a shame it is that Black Friday has become commercialised and lost its original meaning. Well, Singles Day has very definitely become commercialised and lost its original meaning. It can be traced back to Nanjing University in the 1990s where four male students of unknown levels of defensiveness about their singlehood decided to hold what they initially called Bachelor’s Day. The idea then seeped out to other Chinese universities and beyond and began to be celebrated by both men and women.

But it only became the festival of consumerism it is today courtesy of ecommerce giant Alibaba, which in 2009 started to promote Singles Day as a mass self-treating event, assisted by the arrival of discounts and introduction of new or limited-edition product lines.

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What better way is there to take pride in single status than to buy yourself a little something, or maybe even several little somethings? With the kind help of everybody from Daniel "007" Craig to Taylor Swift (who launched Alibaba's event last year by singing her appropriately titled hit Me!), the marketing of Singles Day has proven so successful that Alibaba's trademarking of "Double 11" (a reference to the date) has been a bitter pill for rival site JD.com.

Alas, it hasn't been the smoothest of Novembers either for Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba. Last week, his fintech giant Ant Group, the owner of Alibaba-affiliated payment platform Alipay, was on the verge of making the biggest stock market debut in history, only for Chinese regulators to suspend the $37 billion initial public offering (IPO) at the last minute.

‘Revenge spending’

The abrupt intervention wasn’t the best of presents for the share price of Alibaba, in which Ma still has a stake, but a pandemic-boosted Singles Day could still provide a modicum of compensation. Rich Chinese shoppers, intent on “revenge spending” after a Covid-stricken year, are expected to lift Alibaba’s sales alone above its 2019 Singles Day record of $38.4 billion (€32.3 billion).

Such things are not left to chance, of course, and much like the “Early Black Friday deals” that have been plastered all over the home pages of shuttered retailers in Ireland for weeks already, the Singles Day “pre-sales” actually began on its shopping sites in mid-October.

The year has been a mixed one for the self-partnered. On the one hand, there’s been a breakthrough on the pavements, where the realisation has slowly dawned on the faces of pairs and trios that it is not compulsory to walk abreast at all times – in the self-interested name of social distancing, it may indeed be wise to rediscover the lost art of single file and let the odd solo pedestrian pass.

On the other hand, it took the Government, or rather two governments, seven months to adopt “support bubbles” as part of its public health policy. Cool way to make single-person households feel invisible, governments.

Marketers, to be fair, are already intimately familiar with self-gifting and self-care as impulses for spending among the wider population. In the Covid-19 crisis, they have been handed the bonus line that it is virtuous for people with disposable income to support the economy by typing in their credit card details and digging out their Eircode as often as possible. To covet a new iPad, a Melania-esque set of Christmas decorations and every unmoored homeware in town isn’t spendthrift or shallow, it’s practically altruistic.

And yet Singles Day, as a phenomenon, remains untouched. Perhaps the parameter-setters at Amazon are simply too invested in their own Prime Day to bother pushing Alibaba's wheeze, or perhaps other retailers fear they would be laughed off the internet if they made a fuss about another "day" so close to the established Black Friday.

Gift-wrapped opportunity

Either way, Singles Day feels like an untapped yet gift-wrapped opportunity for sites to flog the life out of all the stuff clogging up their warehouses through the use of some judiciously targeted ads. The fact that they don’t suggests that, as gangbusters a year as retailers have had online, the whole ecommerce business is still only warming up.

You only have to look at the downs and ups of Reckitt Benckiser's Durex sales throughout 2020 to see that the concept of heightened pent-up demand in a pandemic isn't confined to Ikea or Penney's. Once lockdowns returned with a vengeance to Europe, the goal was surely left wide open for its suffering retailers to import Singles Day and help offset the purgatorial mood. After all, once the Swinging Twenties properly get going, everybody will be far too busy having an amazing time to shop.