Singles Day ended hours ago in China, and Alibaba (BABA) made a little bit of money: A record-breaking $9.3 billion (57.1 billion yuan) flowed through the e-commerce giant on Tuesday as China’s bachelors and bachelorettes swooped up designer digs and gadgets at discounted prices.
For the first time, it makes sense to ask if the wave of Singles Day spending reached all the way to the U.S. A number of American retailers, including Costco, Tesla, American Eagle Outfitters, and Calvin Klein, tried to cash in on the madness. The goal, beyond making money, was to start a relationship with some of China’s 360 million online shoppers, a demographic that dwarfs the entire U.S. population. At Gilt Groupe, for instance, Singles Day looked like “the perfect opportunity to drive excitement for our Chinese customers,” the online retailer wrote in a blog post.
“It went really, really well,” says Marshall Porter, senior vice president and general manager of international and business development at Gilt. Porter claimed the company’s Singles Day sales grew 1,150 percent from 2013, but did not share the actual sales numbers.
Unfortunately for U.S. retailers, not much of the windfall landed overseas. About 14 hours into Singles Day, Alibaba reported the top five brands by gross merchandise volume were Xiaomi ($163 million worth of phones in just 12 hours), Haier, Uniqlo, Huawei, and Linshimuye. With the exception of Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel retailer, the sales champs all hail from China.
One reason why U.S. companies may not have gotten the biggest lift from Tuesday is that Singles Day, despite Alibaba’s global ambitions, remains a predominantly Chinese event. “In terms of it impacting shopping in the U.S. and people thinking, ‘It’s Singles Day, let’s go shopping,’ I’m not hearing a peep,” says Hayley Silver, vice president of Bizrate Insights, a division of marketing consultant Connexity.
Despite Wall Street’s affection for Alibaba and the media stir the company’s September IPO caused, the U.S. public does not have Alibaba fever. In Connexity’s survey (PDF) of 3,500 U.S. shoppers, 63 percent of respondents said they were not familiar with Alibaba.
In China, where Singles Day is a big deal, U.S. companies face a different problem. If you’re a Chinese consumer and you’re looking to treat yourself, a discounted Xiaomi smartphone will beat a two-and-a-half-pound package of Costco’s unseasoned mixed nuts every time. Many of the brands trying to make Singles Day happen aren’t particularly well known in China.
“If a company that participates is not that well known in China—if they don’t have their own online presence in China, or a physical store, or they’re not like Coach or Nike—then I think there’s probably going to be reluctance to buy something,” says Randy Allen, senior lecturer at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. “It’s halfway around the world, and I don’t know their quality. Is it something I want to try out for a gift-giving opportunity, or am I going to stick with brands that I trust?”
That’s not to say U.S. companies hoping to use Alibaba to carve out a piece of the Chinese market are doomed to obscurity. It just means names that are big in America but relatively unknown in China will have to do their homework to land bigger Singles Day sales numbers in the years ahead.
