The recent 12.12 online shopping festival broke the record of the previous Singles’ Day event in terms of how much Filipinos spent shopping on online platforms.
The annual Singles’ Day on November 11, touted as the biggest online shopping day, racked up higher profits in Asia than that of the counterparts Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States.
Data from iPrice Group, a Malaysian-based information aggregator platform, showed that Filipino consumers spent more last December 12 with an average basket of P1,518 than the previous sale, where they spent an average of P1,217 per basket.
The results were different from that of last year. Filipinos’ spent an average of P1,106 per basket during Singles’ Day in 2018 while the basket size for its follow-up shopping fiesta was only P854.
The platform gathered and analyzed the data from over 100 online merchants and more than 35 million products in the Philippines during the 12.12 event.
They attributed this to Filipinos’ habit for some last-minute online shopping in December than at any time of the year.
“This 78% surge is much more than the 10% surge of 11.11 sale this year. This goes to show that consumers are more inclined to spend in December to do some last-minute (online) Christmas shopping,” the platform said.
In terms of category, Filipinos purchased fashion items the most with an average buy of P3,765, which is 377% higher than of last year. Fashion products bought were mostly clothing, bags and shoes.
Next to this was the electronics category wherein Filipinos bought products related to mobile phone usage such as hi-fi items, phones and tablets.
“This year, the small amount of sales in this category were made from action sports items,” iPrice Group said.
Filipinos splurged the least in sports products this time, presumably because they already spent much during the November festival when sports items were the top purchases.
“Last year, most of the sales were attributed to the purchase of gym items. This year, the small amount of sales in this category were made from action sports items,” the group said.
The sales for this category this year was also 83% lower than that of 2018.
11.11 and 12.12
The Double 12 shopping festival is just the less-celebrated sequel or follow-up of the Singles’ Day.
The only difference is that the 12.12 focuses on smaller online vendors that might have been left out or side-tracked during the main shopping occasion.
“It’s meant to support Taobao’s smaller vendors, which are usually “sidelined” during the Singles’ Day shopping spree partly because they lack the resources for large sales volumes and deep discounts,” Alibaba was quoted as saying in an article from South China Morning Post.
