For those unaware, Singles’ Day was China’s retailing equivalent of Black Friday. And much like Black Friday, Singles’ Day was the retail story of the year in China: a 24-hour frenzy of flash deals, crashing apps and ever-bigger sales numbers for Alibaba and its rivals.
This year, the number is still enormous – nearly 1.7 trillion yuan in transactions, according to retail data firm Syntun – but the mood is very different. Growth has slowed, shoppers are trading down, and the festival has quietly stretched into a month-long slog of discounts rather than one jaw-dropping day.
It’s still the biggest shopping event on the planet. It just no longer feels like a boom-time party.
Big numbers, smaller jump
On the surface, the headline looks impressive. Syntun estimates that this year’s Singles’ Day promotions generated almost 1.7 trillion yuan in sales value across the major e-commerce platforms – up close to 18% on 2024.
The catch is the comparison. Last year, sales were estimated at around 1.44 trillion yuan, up roughly 26–27% from 2023. The growth rate has clearly downshifted, even as platforms have thrown more time, more marketing and more technology at the event.
The structure of the festival has also changed. What used to be a one-day blowout now runs from early October through 11 November, with pre-sales, deposit schemes and rolling promotions. This year’s calendar was the longest yet.
That makes the headline figure look healthier, but it also makes year-on-year comparisons fuzzier. Stretch the sale long enough, and almost every purchase in late autumn starts to look like a Singles’ Day purchase.
The frugal shopper takes centre stage
Behind the slower growth is a consumer who is still very much on the defensive.
China’s property market remains in a prolonged slump, wages have been under pressure, and youth unemployment – even after changes to how it’s reported – is widely seen as high. That is exactly the cohort that used to splurge most enthusiastically on big Singles’ Day hauls.
The result this year: more baskets, smaller tickets.
- Shoppers gravitated toward cheaper brands, private-label goods and everyday essentials.
- Big-ticket categories like premium electronics and home appliances were more reliant on heavy discounting and subsidies to shift volume.
- Promotions were structured to extract commitment early – deposits in October, final payment in November – which helps platforms manage traffic but also locks in cautious consumers before they can change their minds.
Consultancies tracking the event describe it as a sign that consumption isn’t collapsing, but it has matured. One analyst summary put it bluntly: people are still spending, just “more carefully and over a longer window” instead of impulse-buying on the day itself.
Platforms chase volume, shoppers chase value
Another striking feature this year was how little the platforms wanted to say about overall sales.
Alibaba, whose Tmall and Taobao platforms turned Singles’ Day into a national event in 2009, once treated gross merchandise value (GMV) as a scoreboard watched around the world. Those days are gone. For 2025 it again declined to publish a headline GMV figure, choosing instead to highlight how many individual brands doubled their sales or hit internal targets.
JD.com took a similar tack: it touted record turnover, a strong rise in orders and more shoppers on its platform, but stopped short of a clean, festival-wide sales number.
On one level, that shift reflects Beijing’s broader discomfort with tech-sector braggadocio. On another, it lines up neatly with the reality of the event: Singles’ Day is no longer about one giant spike in GMV; it’s about engagement, repeat visits and keeping shoppers inside the ecosystem in the face of fierce competition.
The competition now includes not just rival marketplaces like PDD, but instant retail – one-hour or same-day delivery services that blur the line between grocery, convenience store and e-commerce. Many of those rapid-delivery promotions were folded into this year’s Singles’ Day campaigns.
Under the hood, the festival is also becoming a showcase for AI. Platforms leaned heavily on algorithmic recommendations, automated copywriting for product listings and AI customer-service agents to nudge conversion higher without simply throwing ever-bigger coupons at users.
In other words: the days when Singles’ Day could grow purely on the back of new users and bigger discounts are over. Now it is an optimisation problem.
A barometer Beijing can’t ignore
Singles’ Day is still watched as a rough gauge of how households are feeling about their finances. Policymakers in Beijing want “domestic demand” – consumer spending and private investment – to do more of the heavy lifting as export growth slows and property construction remains weak.
On that score, this year’s numbers are neither a disaster nor a triumph.
- The fact that sales grew at all, and at a mid-teens clip, suggests Chinese consumers have not shut their wallets.
- The slower pace, and the tilt toward cheaper products and longer promotions, underlines how nervous many households still are about jobs, housing and future income.
Economists point out that retail sales growth in official monthly data remains modest and has lost momentum as 2025 has gone on. Singles’ Day may have given October and November a lift, but it has not reset the trajectory of the consumer economy.
The government can nudge sentiment at the margins through tax tweaks, vouchers and subsidies. It cannot, via shopping festivals alone, undo the drag from an overbuilt property sector and years of patchy income growth.
What it means for brands
For global and domestic brands, the 2025 festival delivered a clear message: volume is there, but you have to work harder for it and accept tighter margins.
Three practical shifts stand out:
- Singles’ Day is now a campaign, not a day.
Marketing teams can’t treat 11 November as a one-night stand. With pre-sales starting in early October, brands need layered campaigns: teaser drops, deposit incentives, live-streams, influencer collaborations and then a final push as the clock runs down. Those that only “show up on the day” risk being invisible. - The middle is getting squeezed.
Premium labels that can signal quality and offer exclusive bundles still did well, particularly in beauty, health and tech. At the other end, aggressively priced local brands rode the value wave. The soft spot is the unremarkable mid-tier product that cannot justify a higher price but also doesn’t win in a pure discount battle. - Data and service matter as much as discount.
With AI-driven targeting now standard, shoppers notice when a brand’s presence feels lazy – generic copy, poor images, slow replies to queries. In a year when big coupons were everywhere, service quality and post-sale support were an important differentiator for repeat purchases.
For multinationals, there is also a strategic question: how much to lean into a single event which, while massive, is increasingly competitive and margin-thinning? Some are experimenting with using Singles’ Day as a traffic spike that feeds their own direct-to-consumer channels, instead of treating platform sales as the final destination.
Still the biggest show in town – just a different script
Strip away the hype and this year’s Singles’ Day looks like a microcosm of China’s broader consumer story: still large, still functional, but more cautious and more complex than the headline growth rate suggests.
The money is there – 1.7 trillion yuan of it over a few weeks of promotions. The enthusiasm is muted. Shoppers are trading up in some categories, down in others, stretching paycheques further and demanding more value for every yuan. Platforms are leaning on AI and longer sales windows to make the numbers work.
For anyone trying to understand where Chinese consumption goes next, Singles’ Day is no longer just a record-breaking spectacle. It’s a stress test – of confidence, of business models and of just how far discount-driven growth can be pushed before the party feels more like a shift at the checkout.
