China’s fast trains do double duty on ‘11.11’

This marks the fourth year that China’s Fuxing Bullet train, the fastest high-speed rail travelling at 350 km/h, has been part of the world’s largest shopping extravaganza—”Double 11″ — also known as Singles’ Day.

The railway department will provide “storage to storage” service to e-commerce businesses and express delivery companies during the busiest period which lasts from November 11 to 20, in an attempt to ease the transport pressure and shrink the customers’ waiting time, CGTN online reported.

What’s more, the newly-developed cold chain delivery system will be put into use for food and special drug delivery in case of damaging the quality of products, according to a Chinese local media report.

The Fuxing bullet trains have shortened the Beijing-Shanghai travel time to four hours and 24 minutes.

Data shows that over 187 million parcels were delivered between November 11 to 16 last year.

The parcel amount handling on November 11 was three times that of a normal day. Facing the huge demand, the whole express industry has to be fully prepared, but delayed services and broken parcels are still hard to avoid.

This year, express companies and e-commerce platforms began cooperating several days ahead of the shopping spree.

All cargo delivered via the train system should have security check. In order to ease the burden of the logistic system, e-commerce platforms launched pre-sales, asking customers to pay deposits.

When buyers place the order and get the deposit done, the seller will have their information, and arrange relevant delivery ahead of time.

Li Hao, head of the Beijing Railway Logistics Center, told reporters that this pre-sale mode and the bullet trains have largely eased the transportation pressure, and can help them achieve “same-day arrival”, “next morning arrival” and “arrival in one day” with no delay.

According to CNBC, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba set a sales record on Singles Day.

Gross merchandise value, a figure that shows sales across Alibaba’s shopping platforms, surpassed last year’s 213.5 billion yuan record (nearly US$30.5 billion) on Monday afternoon local time and kept rising through the rest of the day, the CNBC report said.

At the end of the event, GMV stood at 268.4 billion yuan, just under a 26% rise from the figure posted last year. That’s a slower growth rate than the 27% seen on last year’s Singles Day. In dollar terms, the GMV figure was around US$38.3 billion.

Alibaba offered huge discounts across its e-commerce sites such as Tmall.

To help boost sales, online personalities often speak to their followers and talk about products as well. On Wednesday, Kim Kardashian did a livestream announcing her fragrance brand KKW will be available for sale on Tmall, the CNBC report said.