(Yicai) Nov. 24 -- With Black Friday sales underway, several Chinese e-commerce vendors said new Amazon pricing rules, steep discounting, and weakening consumer purchasing power in Western markets are squeezing their profit margins and putting sales targets at risk.

Taking place the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States -- the fourth Thursday in November -- Black Friday falls on Nov. 28 this year. Amazon kicked off sales on Nov. 20 and will run them through the 28th, while Chinese rivals ByteDance's TikTok Shop, Alibaba Group's AliExpress, and PDD Holdings' Temu have also launched deals.

The annual shopping day, which marks the start of the festive season, will have a longer sales run this time compared with previous years, while content-driven platforms such as TikTok Shop are putting more resources into their promotions, said Zhang Zhouping, executive director of Bense Think Tank.

Amazon’s recently announced more transparent pricing policy, which aims to ensure buyers get genuinely low prices, affects almost all of the items being sold by one clothing merchant based in Xiamen. The vendor said he cannot join in the platform’s promotional activities unless he cuts prices further, which would slash his profit margins.

The new policy requires merchants to discount based on their lowest price over the past three months, making it harder for them to discount during major sales events, Zhang noted, adding that the policy gives consumers clearer pricing information, but squeezes margins.

Another vendor, a battery seller from Guangdong province with shops on Amazon, Temu, and TikTok Shop, said the policy has had little impact on his business because customers are more concerned about quality.

With demand for rechargeable batteries growing in Europe and the US, the launch of several new products this year, and an additional 5 percent discount compared with a year ago, the battery seller said he set his Black Friday sales target at CNY50 million (USD7 million), despite sales topping only CNY20 million last year.

But after weak first-day sales, the vendor admitted he is starting to worry about hitting the target and fears total sales could amount to only about two-thirds of the goal, though that would still represent growth compared with last year.

He blamed broader issues for the weaker performance. “The purchasing power of consumers in Europe and the US is weakening,” he pointed out, adding that plans to start focusing more on China’s domestic e-commerce market and may open a store on a platform there when the timing is right.

Almost 70 percent of consumers say inflation will affect their spending plans over Black Friday, with 39 percent expecting to cut back on shopping and only 29 percent expecting to spend more, according to the results of a survey by LendingTree, an online marketplace that connects consumers with a network of lenders.

Some 47 percent of Generation Z, or those born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, will spend less during Black Friday due to inflation, per the survey.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev