'Singles Day' has shoppers ready to spend big

A Taobao vendor takes care of orders in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, on Thursday as Double Eleven Shopping Festival nears. [LYU BIN / FOR CHINA DAILY]

Chinese consumers will spend on average 1,800 yuan ($295) per person during Double Eleven Shopping Festival, according to AdMaster, an independent third-party digital marketing data analysis and management solution provider.

The Nov 11 online shopping spree in the name of "Singles Day", a celebration for single people, has become China's most popular annual commercial event and created an e-commerce miracle.

Singles Day became 24 hours of crazy online shopping when Alibaba Group, operator of e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, launched its first sales campaign on Nov 11, 2009.

Since then, Singles Day sales at Tmall snowballed from 50 million yuan in 2009 to 19.1 billion in 2012, and are expected to top 30 billion this year.

In an AdMaster survey, almost 40 percent of respondents expect to spend more than 1,000 yuan on the day. In 2012, Tmall recorded transactions of 19.1 billion yuan on the day.

"The festival is not merely about a day or several days of online sales promotion. Brands should therefore effectively tie in marketing and sales by making use of insights from big data to fine-tune their marketing strategy as well as enhancing their sales conversion rate," said AdMaster's CEO Vincent Yan.