A worker arranges goods at a warehouse of an e-commerce platform at Lianyungang, East China’s Jiangsu Province on December 8, 2020. Online retailers have been working day and night to prepare for the upcoming Double 12 shopping festival. Photo: CNSphoto

As the sequel to the Double 11 online shopping carnival, sales volume during the Double 12 shopping festival, which wrapped up Saturday, appears to have again placed a distant second, perhaps even third as it came and went without much hype.

Major e-commerce platform including Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo and Suning have not yet released their key sales statistics. Alibaba does not release its sales figures for the Double 12 event. 

Alibaba's Tmall Double-11 online global shopping festival in November reported sales of 498.2 billion yuan ($75.3 billion) from November 1 to 11, 26 percent higher than last year and the highest rate of growth in the past three years.

Some shoppers still managed to get good deals and vendors racked up impressive quick sales on Saturday.  

JD.com became the country's first online platform to accept China's digital currency, after the Suzhou municipal government in East China's Jiangsu Province handed out 100,000 virtual red packets totaling 20 million yuan ($3 million) to local residents in a lottery, to encourage spending by Double 12 shoppers.

Within five minutes of kick off on Saturday, more than 100,000 coupons issued by Suning were bought. Consumers bought coupons for 9,000 cups of milk tea within 30 minutes and 24,000 movie tickets within an hour, data from the company showed.

"I bought most of our family needs during the Double 11 festival, but I had forgotten an important thing during the cold winter: a down jacket," Chi, a Beijing resident, told the Global Times on Sunday.

She has placed an order for three down jackets for herself and her parents. "The discount was big. A down jacket regularly priced around 3,000 yuan ($458.4) I bought for only 980 yuan," she said.

While some consumers said they broke their budget on a Double 11 shopping spree.

Li, a 30-year-old resident in Shanghai who likes shopping, told the Global Times that he nearly reached his credit card limit on November 11. "Since then, I have realized that I have to spend less or I will run into financial trouble," he said adding that he didn't buy anything during Saturday's shopping festival.

"This year's Double 11 festival lasted longer than previous years, and consumer demand was fully released," Hu Qimu, a senior researcher at the China Digital Economy Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday.

For the merchants, the two biggest sales promotions are Double 11 and June's 618. 

"In view of the economic situation this year, merchants' cash flow may not be sufficient. For them, the ratio of their investment and output during Double 12 would definitely be not as high as that is in Double 11," Hu noted.