Double 11 records massive sales, despite a final day Alipay outage

Taobao and Tmall Group, Alibaba Group's retail operations in China, have announced strong growth in gross merchandise volume (GMV) and reached a record number of active buyers during the 16th annual 11.11 Shopping Festival, the longest to date. The top-performing product categories in the five-week long festival were home appliances, consumer electronics, beauty and apparel. 

The festival, which started in 2009 with only 27 participating merchants, has evolved into a major e-commerce shopping maraton. For detailed coverage of insights and trends, you can read Campaign's coverage here. 

Key highlights: 

Brand performance: This year, not a single platform has announced the exact GMV rate. However, a record 589 brands surpassed RMB 100 million (US$13.8 million) in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV), a significant increase from 402 in 2023. This includes 45 brands exceeding RMB 1 billion (US$ 138 million) in GMV, a group that includes major players such as Apple, Haier, Midea, Xiaomi, Nike, and Wuliangye.

However, on the morning of November 11, Ant Group's online payment platform and Alibaba Group's fintech system, Alipay, Ant Group's Alipay experienced a partial service outage hitting payment processing for users. While Ant Group stated the issue was resolved within a few hours but users reported getting a range of error messages, including "payment failed," "transaction creation failed," and "service abnormal." Furthermore, some users also reported that Alipay failed to credit their account balances after successful transactions, raising concerns about the security of the system. 

While Ant Group issued a Weibo statement (see below) claiming the issue was resolved within a few hours and funds remained secure, they have not responded to Campaign Asia-Pacific's queries on the reasons. The scale and duration of the disruption raises questions about the platform's ability to handle peak demand during major shopping events.

Reports of similar payment failures on Xiaohongshu in late October have also surfaced. Issues relating to instances where pre-sale prices on Tmall were higher than final order prices, have led to customer dissatisfaction and refunds at the time. Chinese media outlets have pointed out, that in such instances, Tmall's customer service provides minimal assistance and only offers the option of refund or re-order.