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

The annual Double 11 e-commerce shopping festival draws to a close on Thursday, amid the country's strengthened anti-monopoly regulation of platform economy. Trends show that Chinese shoppers are becoming more rational and focused on low-carbon products this year compared with the previous years.

The search of Double 11 and products increased by 25 percent compared with 2020, with searches for beauty products and cosmetics up 46 percent, and smart home appliances up 38 percent, according to a report released by Baidu on Thursday.

According to electronics retailer Suning's consumption data, during the first 30 minutes on Thursday, the sales of medium and high-end home appliances on Suning's e-commerce platform saw a year-on-year growth of 43 percent, with smart home decoration sales rising 88 percent.

Low-carbon consumption is on the rise, with a 186 percent year-on-year increase in the number of mobile phones traded in for new handsets on Suning.

On November 5, Alibaba's Tmall published for the first time a green list of goods, which ranges from green home appliance, green food, water-saving products, new-energy vehicles (NEVs), according to a report from Tmall sent to the Global Times.

"Energy saving", "low-carbon" and "organic" were the top search terms during  the 2021 Double 11 shopping festival on Tmall. More than 500,000 green goods debuted on the Tmall platform, an affiliate to Alibaba.

Shoppers purchased more than 25,000 water-saving lavatory products in the first hour on November 1, when the shopping carnival kicked off, which would save roughly 225 tons of water a day. 

More than 120,000 green home appliances were bought within 9 hours. In terms of carbon reduction contribution, 345 tons of carbon emissions would be cut from smart washing machines sold, 260 tons from air conditioners and 194 tons from refrigerators, according to Tmall.

A customer received her Huawei P50 pro mobile phone 7 minutes after she made the order on JD.com, which was also the first delivery order after the opening of the "peak day" of JD.com at 8 pm on Wednesday. JD.com has advanced the purchase time so that users don't have to wait until midnight.

The effect of anti-monopoly policy on platform economy has been shown from consumers' choice of e-commerce platforms - the searches of leading e-commerce platforms reduced while that of emerging e-commerce platforms rose, revealed the Baidu report.

Consumers' searches on Alibaba's Taobao dropped from 34 percent in 2020 to 24 percent in 2021, while enquiries on JD.com dropped from 27 percent to 18 percent. But 9 percent of customers searched products on Xiaohongshu, up from 4 percent in 2020. Short-video platform Douyin won 8 percent of searches, the fifth most searched platform after being included in the "others" category in 2020.

Livestreaming continued to be a hot trend. Big data showed that the search engagement for live broadcasts increased 141 percent month-on-month in the past 30 days.

Global Times