Reading Blog 1

Haas, B. (2016). Singles’ Day: Chinese to splurge $20bn in world's biggest shopping event. The Guardian [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/11/singles-day-chinese-to-splurge-20bn-in-worlds-biggest-shopping-event. [Assessed November 13th, 2016]

“Singles’ Day: Chinese to splurge $20bn in world's biggest shopping event” by Benjamin Haas appeared on The Guardian [online]. In this article, Haas reports that Alibaba – the largest Chinese E-commerce company has gained an extremely large turnover in the annual occasion. $20bn was anticipated to be spent by Chinese customers in the Singles’ Day that maintains to be the biggest shopping event all over the world. Alibaba has received US$1.47bn in first seven minutes on November 11, 2016 by online good sold. Total revenue for this day is $20bn, higher than both Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the US, the two biggest shopping events in this country. This article also mentions about the strategies of Alibaba to growth the value of goods sold in this day. However, customers still complain about the services of online buying was not pleasant in Singles’ Day whereas sellers were satisfied with the higher sales volume.

From my point of view, this article gives me a comprehensive view of the sales volume of Alibaba in Singles’ Day. For my discipline, it is a helpful report that help me understand more about Chinese Market, how Alibaba gain the high turnover and the importance of focusing on trading in a special day like Singles’ Day. It is the real case that you can apply in Marketing and E-Commerce. The argument is well support with strong evidences such as lot of numbers of sales or interviews.

However, the information is limited with the situation of one specific day. Moreover, because the article gives the report on sales volume of Alibaba in Singles’ Day, it is commercial interest. The limitation of the ideas expressed is that the author just focuses on Alibaba, instead of adding more information about other companies in China.

This source is reliable because the article has been published on The Guardian, the top quality newspaper with high reputation in the UK. The Guardian owned by The Scott Trust Limited, an non-profit organisation. Therefore, there are not many commercial interest in this newspaper. Besides, the author – Benjamin Haas is a journalist in Hongkong who has many articles in The Guardian. I have read some other articles written by him. I think he has given reliable information with strong evidences in this article.