(Yicai) Nov. 13 -- This year's Double 11 shopping festival is bringing in fewer sales than those of previous years, according to merchants and a third-party monitoring agency even though major e-commerce platforms claim otherwise.

Several vendors said that sales during the annual Singles' Day shopping extravaganza this year were below expectations. Sales were "surprisingly and unimaginably bad for the first time in the past decade," one merchant wrote on social media, adding that he used to be able to sell 1,000 orders per day during previous years but less than 100 this year.

Syntun, an Big Data platform, revealed yesterday that on the last day of Double 11 (Nov. 11), online transactions totaled CNY277.7 billion (USD38.6 billion) or over one billion parcels, whereas the corresponding sum had been CNY307.6 billion last year with more than 1.2 billion parcels, and as high as CNY332.8 billion in 2020.

Internet giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.Com have a different story. The number of users and merchants on Alibaba-backed Tmall grew significantly, driving up orders and the total transaction value during the festival period of nearly three weeks, Tmall said on No. 11. JD.Com noted on the same day that its transaction value, orders and number of users hit record highs during the event. But neither of the two revealed specific data.

Zhou Li, a dealer of food and healthcare products, told Yicai that he could sell from CNY500,000 to CNY600,000 (USD68,519 to USD82,223) of products on Nov. 11, 2017 without any advertisements but on Nov. 1 this year the corresponding sum was less than CNY10,000 (USD1,370).

"Owners of clothing factories were feeling down in the dumps after over 10 days since the Double 11 Shopping Festival started,” per Xu Ming, owner of a garment plant in Guangzhou. He works with a dozen of online-famous women’s apparel stores. Xu’s factory orders fell by 30 percent to 40 percent during the festival this year from previous years. They even declined by 40 percent to 50 percent from the first half of this year.

Platform discounts are lower this year and people are talking about Double 11 much less, Xu said. Merchants used to offer big discounts but in recent years the competition has intensified and profit margins are squeezed, the factory owner added.

"This year is the most sluggish year," Li Si who has been doing e-commerce for 14 years said. "I could sell 20,000 orders a day on ordinary days but only 10,000 or so on the first day of the festival this year," per Li who mainly sells high-end gifts.

The sluggish Double 11 Shopping Festival has something to do with the fact that consumers are less willing to buy, Xu believes. Many consumers complain that garments are ugly and of poor quality this year, which is another reason for the falling consumption, and this is actually a vicious circle. Merchants may invest in hundreds of thousands of yuan or even millions of yuan to make original designs which are of high-quality and beautiful in design. These products become inventory if they are not sold. If one item becomes a bestseller, knock-offs will come into existence in two or three days, and consumers will choose products with the lowest price, the factory owner added.

Another issue of the Double 11 shopping festival is that special offers last for a too long period of time, Zhou said. Almost every month, there are special offers, the food and healthcare product seller said, adding that in previous years, the Singles' Day festival used to give consumers a sense of urgency. Special offers are supposed to last for one day but now they last for half a month. Moreover, they result in the same quantity of orders as but less profit than earlier.

Tmall started the Double 11 shopping festival in November 2009 and soon more platforms joined the successful booster of sales. This year, the festival started on Oct. 24 on Tmall and on Oct. 23 on JD.Com and ended on Nov. 11 on both platforms.

Editor: Emmi Laine