A worker prepares goods for delivery at an e-commerce industrial park in Lianyungang, East China’s Jiangsu Province on Sunday. The first sales window for this year’s Double 11 shopping festival kicked off the same day, and it will run until Tuesday. The second window will end on November 11. The State Post Bureau forecast that the country’s express sector will peak in the November 11 week, with an average of 490 million packages delivered each day. Photo: cnsphoto

US brands are accelerating their pace of opening online stores on China’s e-commerce platforms in a bid to boost their business amid the resurgent coronavirus and ahead of China’s annual global shopping festival.

On this year’s Double 11 or Singles' Day shopping festival, which kicked off on Sunday, 100 brands recorded sales on Tmall of more than 100 million yuan ($14.9 million) just 111 minutes into the event, providing a snapshot of the recovering Chinese consumption power.

Driven by the market potential, a number of US brands from luxurious brands to cosmetics, have opened online stores on Tmall ahead of this year’s Singles’ Day event, making their first forays into the Asian market.

One such company is US luxury brand Marc Jacobs, which opened the brand's official online store on Tmall in September, offering a lineup of products covering ready-to-wear, accessories, bags and footwear.

US cosmetic brands are also getting involved. Blinc, a US professional eye makeup brand, and Too Faced, a beauty brand under the Estee Lauder Group, have opened stores on Tmall Global. 

It was already a trend for US brands to embrace Chinese e-commerce platforms to seek a wider market and the economic fallout from COVID-19 has accelerated that trend as China is proving to be one of the few bright spots for their growth, Liu Dingding, an independent tech analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"China is the first major economy to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese people have more money in their pockets compared to some countries where the unemployment rate has soared due to the pandemic. At this time, it is a practical choice for brands to increase their marketing in China,” Liu said.

In the first half of this year, the number of new overseas brands entering Tmall Global increased by 64 percent year-on-year, and from January to March over 200,000 new overseas products were launched on Tmall Global.