介绍:
Lincoln: Today is China’s biggest online shopping festival, the Single’s Day, or double eleven. Retailers, online shopping malls and express delivery services across China have all geared up. For the seventh year in a row, Alibaba will again mark Single’s Day with online sales. Now, this is a really big shopping holiday, almost impossible to avoid. Wu You, the question that everyone wants to have answered is: what have you bought?
Wu You: I’m so excited because this is more like a carnival for me. I bought nutrition pills for my mom, gloves, clothes, dress for the family and then trip package, and books for myself.
Lincoln: You bought a trip package? [WY: Yes.] Where’s the trip to?
WY: Different places. Actually I bought two packages, and one inside China, one abroad.
Lincoln: That’s lovely, that’s lovely. What about you, Brian?
Brian: Well, I guess I’m the anti-Wu You here. [WY: What!?] I have spent absolutely nothing so far [WY: No way Brian.], and I think I’m probably going to make it through the day without spending anything on online shopping. [Lincoln: Nothing whatsoever.] Probably nothing.
Lincoln: Nothing has tickled your fancy, you haven’t seen anything…?
Brian: Obviously I know this thing is going around. As you said, it’s hard to avoid. Like, whether or not you buy something is one thing, but hard to avoid mentioning of it or, seeing it, you know whether it’s people talking about it or advertisements all over the place; you know it’s happening.
WY: By knowing all these news can you really sleep tight last night?
Brian: Who, who needs to shop?
Lincoln: So, Brian, now what you’re saying is, because you’ve kind of – you’ve put yourself outside of it, now maybe there is a great deal for something that you would want, or possibly need, but because you’ve put yourself in this little, “outside Single’s Day bubble” – might pass you by. I am excited for it, but then last night I completely forgot and I fell asleep [Brian: Nice.], so I wasn’t able to make to twelve. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try and make up for it for the rest of the day. In fact, I’m looking at flight deals as well, and Wu You, you’re going to help me out with that later?
WY: So that is why you brought it up.
Brian: Yeah, your travel specialist here.
Lincoln: Yeah, that’s my hope as well. It’s very interesting to see, just kind of how quickly and how trustful young people are of these online commerce sites and these things.
Brian: Right, right. It’s – I think it’s two, two things. One would be the technology aspect, and the other is the financial aspect, because in general younger people tend to be, you know, better, with technology than older people.
WY: And I think when you’re talking about technology and it is not only from the consumer’s concern, but also for the company. Alibaba’s said it has expanded the volume of its cloud computing system. It enables four million orders for a single online retailer on a daily basis.
Brian: Right, right, so you need to obviously be able to do it as a consumer but as, as the business there you need to make it very accessible and easy to use as well.
WY: Talking about that, we can see starting from the midnight last night, during the first ninety minutes of the shopping spree, nearly thirty-two billion yuan or some five billion US dollars worth of merchandise was settled on Alibaba’s Chinese and international marketplaces.
Lincoln: That’s an enormous amount of money.
WY: Seventy-two percent of sales were settled via mobile platforms. So that means a lot of people owning mobile phones, but in the old days, not everyone had a mobile phone, right? So in that case, what has made this come true is that people have the better lives or the upturn of their living standards. And also China has obviously saw a turbulent last century, and then the amount of consumption today even outside of this “holiday” would have been completely unthinkable even 15 years ago.
Lincoln: Yeah, that’s true, and many have also said that the Chinese economy is slowing down and all these kind of things, but, if you look at events like this, you know, these people are buying these things with money that they have, so, you know, there’s definitely growth there, there’s definitely a certain level of affluence. Just, before we go, Wu You – and yeah, Wu You, you and I will be looking at those plane tickets for me later on today, hopefully.
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