(Yicai) Nov. 24 -- Most international e-commerce platforms have launched annual sales for Black Friday, which falls on the day after Thanksgiving in the United States and marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, but Chinese merchants will likely see tighter profit margins due to discounts being "too big" this year.

Stores may not be able to achieve the sales targets set for this year's Black Friday, which is on Nov. 28, several merchants told Yicai.

US e-commerce giant Amazon kicked off its Black Friday sales on Nov. 20 and will run them through Nov. 28. Chinese rivals ByteDance's TikTok Shop, Alibaba Group's AliExpress, and PDD Holdings' Temu have launched their own shopping deals.

This year's Black Friday sales period of leading e-commerce platforms is longer than previous years, Zhang Zhouping, executive director of Bense Think Tank, said to Yicai. In addition, content-based platforms such as TikTok Shop raised relevant investments, Zhang added.

Amazon's new price transparency policy, which allows customers to see the price history of goods, ensures that people can buy products at lower prices, but it has affected all the products at the clothing store of a merchant from China's Xiamen, he told Yicai.

The policy has "made it impossible for me to participate in Amazon's promotional activities because I must offer a lower price, which will greatly affect the profit of my store," the seller pointed out.

Merchants need to offer discounts based on the lowest price in the past three months due to the new price transparency policy of Amazon, making it hard to participate in the latest shopping event, Zhang noted, adding that the rule provides consumers with more transparent price information, but squeezes stores' profit margins.

However, a battery seller from Guangdong with shops on Amazon, Temu, and TikTok Shop told Yicai that the policy has had little impact on him because his customers "are more concerned about quality."

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

However, weak sales on the first day of Black Friday deals made him worry if he could achieve the target, with the figure to only reach around two-thirds of his goal if sales continue at the same rate.

Possible underperformance during Black Friday sales is related to the overall consumption environment, the merchant said. "The purchasing power of consumers in Europe and the US is weakening," he pointed out, adding that he will start paying attention to the Chinese e-commerce market and open a store on domestic platforms at an appropriate time.

Almost 70 percent of consumers say inflation will affect their spending plans during Black Friday this year, with 39 percent estimating to cut back on shopping and only 29 percent expecting to spend more, according to the results of a survey by US lending platform LendingTree. 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.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev