2015年CRI Shopping Festival Has More Global Sellers（在线收听）

For this year's shopping extravaganza, Alibaba has added a new theme, imported goods.

Goods from around the world are being featured in Tmall ads, including the top 25 leading chain-store brands in the world.

That list includes Germany's Metro, the U.K.'s Sainsbury's and Costco from the United States, among others.

Exotic imported items available range from kiwi fruit and fresh lobsters to diapers and cosmetics.

Chu Jia with Alibaba's PR unit says the rise in the number of foreign sellers has made this year's Single's Day promotion more global than ever.

"The most notable change this year is globalization. More than 5-thousand brands from 25 different countries and regions are taking part in the sales promotions. The number of international vendors has reached a record high this year."

Alibaba says the record of imported goods sales from last year's Single's Day was broken less than 2-minutes past midnight.

At the same time, Alibaba's rivals are also trying to rake in profits from Single's Day.

SFBest is subsidiary of Chinese express delivery giant SF Express.

It mainly sells imported foodstuffs.

Song Xin, SFBest's manager, says they have seen a sharp rise in daily sales since this year's promotions first began.

"Our promotion period lasts from Nov 3rd to the 12th, with priority given to raw and fresh food. Sales during the period are expected to rise by about 180 percent from the same period of last month, and double from the same period of last year."

Observers are suggesting the growing sale of imported goods this year is partly the result of the massive tariff cuts the Chinese government has been bringing in, which has significantly lowered prices on imported products.

Cao Lei with the China E-commerce Research Center says the growth in cross-border purchases is going to help the overall development of e-commerce in China.

"Sellers from around the world and cross-border trade have opened the period of so-called mass consumption 3.0 in China. Consumption 1.0 featured customer-to-customer business on platforms like Taobao.com. Consumption 2.0 marked the rise in the popularity of business-to-customer sales through sites like Tmall and JD.com. Now, with the coming of international sellers, Consumption 3.0 has arrived."

It's expected China is going to overtake the U.S. to become the world's biggest retail market in 2018, with retail volume growth expected to grow by nearly 9-percent a year in the next two years.

One survey is suggesting people using the Internet to make their purchases this Singles' Day are going to spend more than 17-hundred yuan each this year.

This would be a 22-percent increase compared to how much the average person spent last year while shopping online during Single's Day.

For CRI, I'm Luo Wen.