Shopping against loneliness
November 11, 2013
Chinese buyers on Monday made ample use of a "Singles' Day" providing online shoppers huge discounts.
The shopping bonanza, especially for the country's singles, got off to a brilliant start, with e-tailers confident they'd take in some 30 billion yuan ($5 billion, 3.73 billion euros) throughout the day.
The sales action was to help singles across the Asian country to forget about their loneliness at least for a while.
Shopping therapy?
Male and female singles are no longer depressed now, because all their attention is focused on the Internet to buy stuff, a poster quipped on Sino Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter. "But afterwards they will realize their problems have not been resolved."
Be that as it may, sales on the business-to-consumer platform Tmall alone hit over $3 billion by midday.
China has the world's largest online population, with annual e-commerce forecast to reach between $420 billion and $650 billion by 2020. By that time, the country would constitute the biggest online retail market in the world, consulting firm McKinsey estimated.
hg/hc (AFP, dpa)