The stage is set for the 2019 Singles' Day shopping festival at Alibaba's headquarters in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province on Saturday. Photo: VCG

China's largest mid-year shopping festival, 618, kicked off on Monday, with pre-sale volumes on Alibaba's Tmall skyrocketing 515 percent year-on-year within an hour.

618,originally means the annual shopping festival on and around June, 18, is of key importance to small vendors on e-commerce platforms this year as it is the first large-scale shopping festival since the outbreak of COVID-19. 

More than 100,000 brands have thus far agreed to join the event on Tmall, double last year's number, with stores from nine countries including Russia and Singapore, the company said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Monday.

From Monday to June 20, Tmall will cooperate with local governments and a variety of brands to issue the country's largest-scale cash coupons and subsidies worth over 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), it said.

These measures to promote consumption are expected to spur consumer enthusiasm which has been contained as people were required to stay inside and the macro-economy faced downward pressure before the virus came under control in China.

On Tmall, pre-sales of consumer electronics and home appliances exceeded 100 million yuan within just seven minutes on Monday, while cosmetics pre-sales surpassed 500 million yuan in the same time.

E-commerce giant JD.com recently announced the platform aims to help 100,000 small and medium-sized brands grow their sales by over 100 percent during 618 through measures like special resources and loans.

On May 10, JD.com said it would invest 1.2 billion yuan to boost smaller brands' digital transformations, providing support in aspects such as marketing, capital and operations.