Staffers sort parcels at a delivery company in Yangzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province on June 14, 2023. Photo: VCG

The "Double 11" online shopping festival, one of China's biggest and most popular annual shopping events, will kick off next week, with major e-commerce platforms striving to offer lower prices and faster delivery to attract new users and boost sales.

Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com said on Monday that the platform will kick off the event at 8 pm on October 23. The company said that plenty of goods will be in stock, which means faster delivery to customers. During the shopping festival, if customers find that prices of items they bought are further discounted later, they can apply for a refund of the price difference, according to a press release on its WeChat account.

Focused on offering lower prices, JD.com aims to offer subsidies worth 2 billion yuan ($279 million) to individual stores on the online platform and provide better, faster but cheaper consumption experience, according to a separate press release.

Tmall, the e-commerce arm of Alibaba Group, announced on Saturday that it will start the promotional event at 8 pm on October 24, with focus on offering the lowest price, Beijing Business Daily reported. Meanwhile, the platform will offer subsidies worth 3 billion yuan to stores on the platform as shopping incentives.

In addition, other major e-commerce platforms including Suning and Pinduoduo also announced their plans and discounts for the Double 11 shopping spree.

In terms of delivery competition, Cainiao Network, Alibaba's logistics arm, recently rolled out half-day express delivery service in Beijing before the upcoming shopping carnival, in a bid to boost the logistics and delivery efficiency.

As part of the Double 11 shopping festival, Southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region recently handed out consumption vouchers worth 8 million yuan which started on October 10 and will last till November 30.


At the end of July, the country's top economic planner rolled out a range of measures to boost consumption of a wide range of items and services including new-energy vehicles, home appliances and cultural and tourism sectors amid efforts to sustain economic recovery and promote high-quality development.

In recent months, the recovery of the consumer market picked up pace with rapid growth in service consumption. 

China's retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of consumption strength, went up 4.6 percent year-on-year in August, accelerating from the 2.5-percent increase in July, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on September 15.