With Spring Festival just around the corner, many across China are busying themselves with preparations for a bright new year. To help consumers welcome the Year of the Ox, Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall launched its Chinese New Year Shopping Festival on Jan. 20 to bring shoppers fun and joy during the holidays even amid the pandemic.
With many choosing not to travel for big family gatherings this year, fast and easy-to-prepare meals have soared in popularity. Welcoming the New Year on a bold-flavored note, Tmall recorded a 1,500% year-over-year* growth in sales for single-serving self-cooking hotpot meals while sales for hotpot base ingredients surged 534% YoY and 222% YoY for Lao Gan Ma chili sauce.
In the lead-up to the Year of the Ox, consumers are also investing in products to make sure they look and feel their best as they step into a new beginning. During this time, sales for medical beauty products reported a 477% jump on Tmall while fitness-related products clocked in a 968% month-over-month increase during the Jan. 20-25 period compared to the same period in December last year.
*Above year-over-year figures are based on publicly available data from Taobao and Tmall comparing Jan 20, 2021 (the first day of Tmall’s Chinese New Year Festival in 2021) and Jan. 2, 2020 (the first day of Tmall’s Chinese New Year Festival in 2020).