Speed overkill

• Source: Global Times
• [09:31 February 17 2011]
• Comments

By Zou Le

Anyone wandering around the lobby of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's Shenzhen building the day before Valentine's Day would have seen five very excited customers eagerly waiting to drive away brand-new cars parked there. They had reason to be excited, as they had paid just 11 yuan ($1.6) each for them.

The cars, which cost 300,000 yuan ($45,534) each on the market, had been auctioned off in a round of popular online sales known as "speed kill," an Internet marketing strategy used by many retailers to promote their products.

The practice involves retailers selecting a number of their products and putting them up for sale online at a fixed time for extremely low prices. Online shoppers then have to compete against each other in the hope of being the first to snap up the products, which are sometimes free of charge and often sold out in just a few seconds.

However, as tempting as it sounds, this online buying method, which once led to a frenzy of online shopping, is gradually losing its appeal for millions of online shoppers due to its lack of transparency, the involvement of professional bidders as well as retailers cheating on the prices.

"There is no way you can get anything. 'Speed kill' is just an unfair game," Teng Lin, a Beijing resident who used to be a big "speed kill" fan and passionate online shopper, said to the Global Times.

New strategy

The term "speed kill" was originally used in video games, first emerging in 2008 and then thriving along with the rapid development of the Internet in China, whose Internet user population shot up to 450 million early this year.

Supported by this massive platform, online sales reached 520 billion yuan ($78 billion) last year, up 106 percent from the previous year, according to statistics released Tuesday by Enfodesh, a Beijing-based consulting firm.

In order to cash in on the growing numbers of online shoppers, sellers have introduced a variety of online sales strategies from "group buying" to "speed kill."

On November 11, 2010, China's largest online auction site taobao.com conducted a "speed kill" sale, in which all the items on the website were sold at half price. The promotion attracted over 20 million users and generated 90 million yuan ($13 million) in sales in a single day.

"When you think about it, it's like an owner telling everyone that everything in his store is free and asking them to come over and fight for it. What are the chances that I will be the one to win this battle?" asked Ming Ming, another online shopper from Shandong who said that he had given up on "speed kill" sales after failing to get anything out of several bids.