Pitney Bowes VP Vijay Ramachandran talks about the shopping holiday that helped inspire Prime Day, and what makes it so massive.
Singles' Day is about shopping and socializing. (Photo via Ch Maheswara Raju, via Wikimedia Commons)
Amazon can take credit for many ecommerce innovations, but few are so bold and successful as Prime Day. In 2015, the company invented a new holiday, centered it around shopping and lifted US retail from its usual midsummer nap along with it.
But for all the rightful lore that will be written, it’s worth noting that Prime Day was not the first ecommerce shopping holiday, and it is not the world’s largest.
That title belongs to Singles’ Day, a shopping extravaganza in China where consumers score deals galore on marketplaces such as Tmall and JD.com. The event culminates on November 11, which is designated as the Singles’ Day holiday to celebrate people who are not in relationships. Alibaba seized on this day as a shopping event in 2009, and it has taken off since. Singles’ Day is now the moniker that describes a weekslong shopping extravaganza, starting in late October.
Even though the US has plenty of experience with designated days for shopping, Singles’ Day trumps them all.
“Prime Day was partly inspired by Singles Day—both are ‘manufactured’ shopping holidays—but Singles’ Day is larger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined,” said Vijay Ramachandran, VP of market strategy in global ecommerce at shipping company Pitney Bowes. “The reason for this is that it is as much a social event as it is a shopping event. That’s something US retailers could learn from.”
With Singles’ Day, commercial and cultural significance work hand-in-hand. As Alibaba’s Tmall offers massive deals through livestreaming events on its ecommerce marketplaces, the company also hosts massive festivals that have attracted Katy Perry and Mariah Carey.
The whole affair is all about meeting others, and it brings people together.
“We’ve yet to see a US shopping holiday have the cultural and social significance of Singles’ Day, which invented a new way for a large portion of the population—single people—to interact,” Ramachandran said. “It’s been so popular that non-single people quickly joined in on the holiday, too.”
By contrast, Prime Day is largely focused only on the shopping side, and, despite the vaunted halo effect, is still seen primarily as an Amazon affair. Singles’ Day also takes a different approach to delivering its deals. Livestreaming events being the primary way that people buy. To be sure, this reflects the preference for live shopping in China as a whole. But it’s worth paying attention to what it creates: Shopping is an event where people gather at a specific time and interact with a host, rather than simply a time to browse for deals.
With US brands and retailers showing more interest in social commerce, there may be room to hold an event that is more directly inspired by the Singles’ Day format.
As one example of interest from a platform, YouTube is currently holding a 10-day shopping event called From YouTube to You, featuring livestreams and shoppable content from its top creators, as well as brands like POPFLEX, Ulta Beauty and TULA Skincare. YouTube this year made a push into live shopping with new features, and clearly sees events as a way to build around them.
“The opportunity is still sitting out there for popular US brands—assisted by an army of their social influencers—to jointly create a shopping holiday that consumers want to celebrate,” Ramachandran said.
Singles’ Day is also a moment to step back and underscore the massive scale of ecommerce in China. In 2021, Alibaba and JD.com set a new record with $139 billion in sales during the event. By contrast, this year’s Prime Day week netted $12 billion in online sales for the US as a whole, according to Adobe Analytics.
The contrast is driven by the scope of the Chinese economy as a whole, Ramachandran said.
China has more consumers than any other country, owing to its world-highest population of 1.4 billion people. In 2021, China’s ecommerce sales totaled $2.49 trillion, while US ecommerce sales came in at $870.8 billion.
There are more products manufactured in China than in any other country, as well. in 2020,
China exported $438 billion worth of goods to the US, while the US exported $122 billion to China.
This has also made China a logistics powerhouse that is only growing. In 2021, China became the first country to ship 100 billion parcels in one year. It shipped 108 billion parcels, marking a 30% increase from 2019, and a big uptick from the 83 billion parcels shipped in 2020, according to the Pitney Bowes 2021 Parcel Shipping Index. That equates to 3,434 parcels shipped per second, or 297 million each day.
Compare that to other countries, and the US was the next closest with 21.6 billion packages shipped, followed by Japan at 9.2 billion.
So what enables this? To be sure, the number of people in China and its emphasis on growing the middle class in recent years makes everything orders of magnitude larger there. But another big reason for the difference is the way a big part of the economy is built for ecommerce in China. The more social nature of shopping drives massive sales. In the supply chain, that has led to a bonanza in the shipping industry, as well.
“Consumers in China skipped desktop computing and went straight to mobile commerce, which meant that buying online anywhere, anytime was normal in China long before it was normal in the US, so ecommerce shipping volumes accelerated much sooner,” Ramachandran said. “This also meant more competition and infrastructure investment for Chinese shipping and logistics companies early on—resulting in the average cost of shipping a parcel in China to be one-sixth of the cost in the US.”
Singles’ Day is the single biggest expression of that fast growth of ecommerce, and shows how it can be harnessed around a big event. Amid the torrent of deals and celebrities, there are likely plenty of opportunities for brands and retailers from across the world to learn. Just look at what Amazon did.
The reversals offer a cautionary tale for executives weighing a classic dilemma: Build or buy?
There’s no doubt that the pandemic ecommerce boom brought massive operational growth across retail. The investment that retailers made to keep up with demand ushered in lasting transformation to fulfillment operations, as we’ve noted in this series.
Yet it’s also true that not everyone can be Amazon. Some of the big supply chain bets made during the pandemic didn’t pan out, especially when ecommerce growth returned to a more normalized trajectory in 2022.
In particular, Shopify and American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) made high-profile moves to scale logistics operations, and even made clear that they were setting out to take on the giants in doing so.
The companies occupy different parts of retail. Shopify is a software company that helps brands run ecommerce, while AEO is a brick-and-mortar-based apparel retailer better known as a mall staple than a digital innovator.
But during the wild ride of the pandemic years, both outfits made bets that they could build logistics operations that would attract small and medium-sized brands looking for an alternative to Amazon, and spent millions to acquire companies that would help them get there.
Alongside the investment, they talked like they wanted to got big.
As AEO COO Michael Rempell put it at Shoptalk in 2022, "There's a supply chain revolution happening and we want to lead it...We think it’s leveling the playing field and allowing like-minded companies to compete with Amazon, Walmart, Target – the biggest retailers in the world.”
In 2023, executives at both companies are singing a different tune. Shopify sold the $2 billion logistics acquisition Deliverr to Flexport. Meanwhile, AEO said its acquisition of Quiet Logistics wasn’t meeting expectations, and backed off an aggressive move to bring other retailers into the fold.
Together, these reversals represent a cautionary tale for retailers weighing how to scale ecommerce to keep up with future growth:
Buying your way into a market may provide a head start, but it’s still a long road to the top.
Let’s take a closer look at both deals to learn more:
Shopify has long been a leading software choice for brands looking to run the frontend of commerce. The tools built by the company and the apps available from its ecosystem of developers provide everything that’s needed to start and scale the demand generation and selling side of ecommerce.
But ecommerce is not just a matter of lining up the bits. It also requires moving atoms. As it sought to offer a more complete ecommerce platform, Shopify lacked its own tools for the backend of ecommerce such as processing goods and delivering them to customers.
There’s good reason for this. Operating fulfillment and delivery is a different business than building software. It requires warehouses and workers and boxes and trucks. Still, it’s an area where there’s a massive opportunity to make life easier for brands. Amazon’s FBA program showed how providing storage, fulfillment and delivery for third-party sellers could serve as a critical connecting point to deepen their ties to Amazon. These sellers may be independent, but the fact that they are reliant on Amazon’s facilities to provide the two-day shipping and free returns that customers expect make it an attractive and convenient way to sell there. Once you’re in, it’s tough to quit.
For its part, Shopify didn’t set out to build a sprawling logistics network. But it did make moves to provide full-service fulfillment. Initially, the Shopify Fulfillment Network had several warehouses. This stood to become supercharged when it acquired Deliverr for $2.1 billion in May 2022. The companies seemed to be a fit. While Deliverr owned warehouses, it had a software-centered approach to logistics that prized predictive analytics and placing inventory close to demand. Shopify executives talked about how it would be an “asset-light” network. Translation: We aren’t building an Amazon-like network, even as we compete with them.
But the move to acquire Deliverr was still expensive, clocking in at Shopify’s largest-ever deal. It also happened to arrive as ecommerce fortunes were shifting amid the return to stores and the weight of inflation on discretionary budgets. A couple of months after it made the acquisition, Shopify laid off 10% of its workforce as CEO Tobi Lutke admitted that the company’s bet on explosive growth for years ahead “didn’t pay off.”
This ultimately presaged a monthslong period of recalibration at the company. By May of 2023, it emerged with more layoffs, this time of 20% of the workforce. Executives spoke of a recommitment to priorities on the frontend of ecommerce, and Lutke disavowed “side quests.” Underscoring the fact that logistics fit into the latter category, Shopify sold Deliverr to Flexport just a year after buying it.
To be sure, Shopfiy will continue to benefit from the logistics network as the preferred partner of Flexport. And the fulfillment operation that Shopify started may still be built out to scale, especially with former Amazon commerce chief Dave Clark at the helm of Flexport. But the fact that Shopify turned away from this approach was ultimately another admission that the bet didn’t pay off. At the end of the day, Shopify runs a software company focused on the bits side of ecommerce. It will continue to leave the atoms side to others.
American Eagle was perhaps a more surprising entrant into the logistics arms race. But as it transformed its own supply chain to make ecommerce a more integrated part of its operation, the retailer saw an opportunity to provide logistics for other brands and retailers, as well.
In its own way, this was also a lesson from Amazon: Build a logistics operation, and it can be opened up to move from cost center to growth engine.
AEO did not lack in boldness and panache as it set out to apply these lessons. It acquired Quiet Logistics for $360 million as it set out to enable next-day and same-day shipping, and AirTerra in a move to aggregate packages.
AEO set out to own its supply chain, allowing it to make moves to save costs and implement omnichannel approaches that would bring store associates into the ecommerce mix, and add efficiency. Ultimately, the retailer decided that acquisitions would help to achieve the scale that was necessary during the pandemic.
In turn, this “hyperscale” would put it in a position to create a new kind of model, EVP and Chief Supply Chain Officer Shekar Natarajan argued. He spoke of creating a “frenemy network” where retailers banded together to create the large networks that the Amazons and Walmarts of the world could build on their own.
By April of 2023, Natarajan was no longer with the company. COO Michael Rempell told analysts that Quiet Logistics had grown at margins “below what we expected,” and the company planned to cut logistics costs.
AEO said the following in a statement to WWD:
“While Quiet’s third party business has grown nicely, it has not achieved the plans we envisioned. As a result, we must pull back on expenses to reset the business. This is necessary to improve profitability, particularly given prevailing macro headwinds….We are reducing the size of the Quiet workforce to be more in line with the current business trend….This decision was not made lightly, and we realize this will impact the lives of affected employees. We will provide them a variety of transition benefits.”
American Eagle Outfitters also stated that it is “committed to the continued transformation of our supply chain, and Quiet Platforms plays an important role in that strategy as we work to achieve increased profitability. Over the past few years Quiet has been tremendously beneficial to AEO, providing much needed distribution and fulfillment capacity to grow our industry-leading brands.”
AEO said Quiet was helping American Eagle’s business. But it restructured the third-party side of the platform that provided services to others, which included downsizing the workforce.
“We now have a leaner organization that will position us well for the future. We see opportunities to leverage Quiet's fulfillment capabilities to unlock even greater efficiencies in our operating model,” Rempell told analysts this week. “This includes optimizing inventory placement, buys, and replenishment as we work upstream through our supply chain.”
AEO did transform its own supply chain, but it appears that the frenemy network is not emerging at the same pace. The move indicates that AEO is sticking closer to the goal of bringing change to its own operations for omnichannel success. For now, that doesn’t mean it needs to provide those efficiencies for others, as well.
Each of the moves detailed above offer examples of companies that opted to scale by acquiring others.
That’s a distinct approach from the other companies we’ve covered in this series, including Amazon, Walmart, Target and Chewy. They all chose to build their own fulfillment operations for ecommerce, albeit in distinct ways.
We point this out not to suggest that acquisition is an automatic recipe for failure, but simply that build vs. buy is a choice that faces executives as they determine how to meet demand and continue growing ecommerce for a future that is still heading toward online shopping occupying a larger share of retail.
When it comes to the “build” camp, the size of the four major retailers listed above gives them an advantage. They have the resources to undertake ambitious, multiyear projects and they were able to direct even more energy into quickly scaling operations when the pandemic called for it. When the pandemic ended, they surveyed the landscape and made moves toward efficiency and sustainable profits.
The two companies in the “buy” category happened to make their acquisitions at a time when ecommerce was at its peak. Their plans involved creating a new network, rather than scaling up an existing one, and the roadmaps were likely altered drastically when the ecommerce trend line came back to Earth. Yet it’s worth noting that they also tried to add parts of their business that were completely new. It brings up an important question for any executive weighing options:
Do you want to be in the business that you’re acquiring for the long haul?
There’s no question that ecommerce companies will have to scale logistics and realize efficiencies that can maintain profitability. But as they do so, they need not forget who they are.
