Earlier in September, the news broke about a new retail holiday being launched, dubbed the 10.10 Shopping Festival. Coresight Research, Shopkick, and Fashwire dreamed up this event as a way to kickstart holiday shopping earlier and help retailers navigate a highly unusual holiday season.
As a result of the pandemic, retailers are dealing with lower supply and longer shipping times. By encouraging earlier shopping, the event hopes to give retailers more time and insight into what consumers want so they can manage their holiday inventory accordingly.
What is the 10.10 Shopping Festival?
Here’s how it works: When shoppers purchase from participating retailers either online or offline, they will earn ‘kicks’ from Shopkick, which they can redeem for free gift cards to retailers like Target, Walmart, Amazon, and others. At the same time, Shopkick will match and donate 5% of all kicks to St. Jude, and Fashwire will donate $0.50 for every download of their app to the same.
According to a Bloomberg article about the holiday, the event has about two dozen retailers signed up so far, and Fashwire is incentivizing its roster of brands to also participate.
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10.10 is modeled after the wildly successful Alibaba Singles’ Day event held in China, on 11/11. This event, which started as a casual celebration of singledom has now become the largest shopping event in the world. According to our own data, online retail sales in key Singles’ Day markets across APAC spiked as much as 477% during the event last year.
How 10.10 and Amazon Prime Day Could Kick-Off Black Friday Season
If 10.10 can capture half as much interest as Singles’ Day, it will be a runaway success both for consumers and its participating retailers. And this year, if Amazon Prime Day also occurs in October as is rumored, there could be a massive halo effect for retailers who run their own promotions at the same time:
Criteo analysis shows that our US clients who ran deals during Amazon Prime Day in 2019 saw an average of 59% more sales compared to the average between June 1 and June 28. Many retailers only participated in discounting for one day, and our data showed that only around 40% of retailers participate at all—leaving a potentially huge opportunity on the table.*
So, will the 10.10 Shopping Festival add some more cheer to the holidays this year? It’s hard to say, but if it can gain momentum it just might replace Black Friday as the new start of the holiday shopping season.
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*Criteo Data, United States, Retailers driving promotions during Amazon Prime Day, July 2019 compared to June 1-28 2019.
