Category: Holiday Supplies Reviews

While Black Friday is traditionally the busiest shopping day in the United States and many other American or European countries, 11 November has become the biggest sale day in China since 2009. As a tradition, Chinese people who are still single get together to celebrate their singlehood on 11.11. But the day turns out to be universal shopping spree day for all Chinese, no matter they are single or not.

As the online payment terminal belonging to Alibaba Group, Alipay.com is widely used in Chinese domestic or international online shopping sites, including their own sites Taobao.com(domestic),  Tmall.com (domestic) and Aliexpress.com (international). The payment service provider is the best example of 11.11 Singles’ Day carnival sale. This year, a total of more than 19.1 billion RMB was paid through Alipay on that single day, with 13.2 billon at Tmall.com and 5.9 billion at Taobao.com, both of which are Alibaba’s domestic online retail sites. Based on the report, about 6 million orders are placed that day on a wide variety of products at the two sites, from apparel & accessories, electronics, toys, luggage & bags, furniture, home & garden, sporting goods to everything else. How crazy are the Chinese shoppers!

• 11.11 Carnival Sale Turnover Trend of Alipay for Tmall.com and Taobao.com since 2009
  

While Taobao.com hosts mostly small and medium-sized sellers, Tmall.com is the truly shopping channel exclusively open to genuine brands only. For the Chinese, it is easy to shop for cheap products at Taobao but the risks are higher as well. There you may encounter dishonest sellers who sell you crappy quality products which are not as described at all. Although Taobao provides payment protection service, when problems are incurred, it can be a real headache to get a satisfying solution sometimes.

Continue reading Chinese Singles’ Day (11 November): The Biggest Sale Day in China

The 2012 Christmas is approaching fast and it is time to plan our list of Christmas gifts for people we love. While adding gift receivers to the list can be easy and quick, many people find it a lot more tricky to prepare suitable Christmas gifts that fit each person we are going to gift, especially when we are on a limited budget. That’s why we always see people scratching about best Christmas gift ideas ahead of when the holiday season arrives every year.

I totally agree that selecting gifts for our family or friends should be a pleasant experience instead of a painful one. Anyway, I also understand that searching for the right gifts is time-consuming and can be quite a stress when we fail to find out gifts that meet our expectation as well as the gift receivers’ styles and preferences. Here I would like to share my personal advice on how to dig out the great gifts for Christmas 2012 and buy them home with a happy wallet.

Based on my own experience, for whatever holiday or festival, as long as we stick to the most popular shopping websites, it will be completely OK even if we have no gift ideas at all. All mature online shops would launch their holiday shopping promotions with neatly sorted categories of gifts that fit different needs in time. As for Christmas 2012, I have checked out a good number of shopping sites across the world and noticed that some have been offering Christmas deals with deep discounts. In particular, some Chinese wholesale or retail stores or marketplaces have been releasing sales for this Christmas one after another (see the sales listed at the end of this post).

Image courtesy of Ahappydeal.com

As we know, Western local stores start to launch promotions for Christmas from Black Friday, which follows Thanksgiving Day and is regarded as the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Unlikely, as lots of Chinese online shops serve both re-sellers and end consumers, they tend to start their Christmas promotional activities much earlier. It takes more time for an order to arrive at a destination in another country. And what’s more important, merchants need to stock up for their inventory in advance so that they can seize the best turnover-boosting opportunities and make more profits.

Continue reading How to Get Suitable Christmas Gifts on a Budget

This year, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 22, 2012 in the United States. It is only two weeks away! As a day for expressing or showing our deepest thanks, Thanksgiving itself seems rather irrelevant to promotional activities held by various stores. However, the holiday is often used by merchants as an important event to boost their revenues or to kick off their Christmas sales.

The fact that Thanksgiving Day precedes Black Friday further enhances its commercial value. Traditionally regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days in the USA. It is all known that stores tend to release the biggest discounts of the year on that day in order to attract customers. But did you know that you may be able to get the same good deals on Thanksgiving Day, without waiting until the next day to snap up the bargains? If you didn’t, it is not late – it is no longer a secret to you now and you may make huge savings by taking advantage of all kinds of Thanksgiving Day 2012 deals.

Image courtesy of Priceangels.com

Seriously, if you are preparing gifts for this Christmas, you should really take a good look at the Thanksgiving Day specials available at different online shops. Oh, I almost forget to mention that by shopping Thanksgiving deals on the internet, you don’t need to rush into the stores in the crazy crowd to seize the Black Friday deals.

The only tricky thing is: you may need to dig out some useful information on where to get the best Thanksgiving bargains online. This is exactly the reason why I am writing this post. I noticed that lots of Chinese shopping websites have been launching their 2012 Thanksgiving Day sales for global buyers. Compared with local stores based in the USA, the UK, Canada and other American or European countries or regions, global online stores based in China generally release specials for a particular holiday much earlier as international shipping takes a while. Shipping time ranges from 3 days to 30 days based on shipping methods or product types. I’ve compiled a list of Thanksgiving promotions on-going at some popular China-based online stores for your reference (see below). Continue reading Preparing for Christmas 2012: Take Advantage of Thanksgiving Day Sales

Christmas is next month! Have you started planning your Christmas shopping list? I guess you might want to know where to get the best deals for the biggest festival of the year. In late September we’ve posted a Christmas shopping guide for merchants at our site (click here to read the post). Here I would like to share some reliable online destinations where individual consumers can buy Christmas gifts, Christmas decorations and any other Christmas supplies at super low prices. By the way, they are all based in China.

Did you know that today many consumers choose to shop straight from China for best savings? Especially for holiday shopping, made-in-China products are very popular among global buyers, including both re-sellers and end consumers. Unbeatable pricing is no doubt their biggest attraction. At the same time, the huge variety of products to choose from makes Chinese online stores the most ideal places for shopping. When it comes to quality standards, although some people are worried about the quality of products made in the country, most customers feel satisfactory about the quality after they receive the goods from online Chinese suppliers. The most common review regarding this topic is: they are good quality for the pricing.

In the past, Chinese international wholesale businesses and retail businesses are separated from each other. Generally, merchants would trade with wholesalers while end consumers do business with retailers. Actually there were very few China-based online retail stores before 2008. In recent years, as internet technology and e-commerce develop fast, cross-border transactions can be made in a much easier way and more and more Chinese wholesale and retail stores emerge. Besides, the traditional wholesale business model is now being seriously challenged by the new one: Chinese suppliers are selling products at wholesale prices for orders of small quantities, as small as 1 piece per order. That is to say, now even wholesale shopping websites are open to individual shoppers.

Based on my findings, lots of Chinese stores combine wholesale business and retail business while focusing on wholesaling or retailing. For consumers, we don’t need to identify which stores run which type of business. What we really need to know is where we can get the best prices. The first and foremost thing is to find out trustful stores which have gained good reputation on the global market and provide quality products as well as satisfactory service. Then, just stick to the pricing and you will be able to shop for what you want on a happy budget.

Below I will introduce some of the best-rated Chinese online shopping sites that fit individual customers like you, in terms of major categories they carry. Continue reading Guide for Individual Shoppers: Where to Get Best Christmas 2012 Deals

For individual shoppers, it is a little bit too early to plan the 2012 Christmas gift list now. However, for resellers or store owners, it is not. Many suppliers have already started their Christmas 2012 early-bird sales. If you are looking for Christmas supplies to get ready for the biggest shopping event of the year, you may find some really good deals from the various offers online around the world.

In one of our previous posts, we have introduced the Christmas 2012 shopping guide for merchants (read the post), in which we shared our knowledge about where to purchase made-in-China products for the Christmas season and how to stay safe with the international shopping. Although the guide basically targets merchants, it fits for end consumers who are prowling the web for best deals on Christmas gifts or other Christmas supplies.

Seeing that both consumers and resellers may need some inspiration to learn about the best Christmas 2012 gift ideas, we decide to research the market and deliver a helpful gift idea guide series for our readers. Here let’s start from novelty items as they are the No. 1 good choice for Christmas gifting based on our research and analysis.

Standing out by creative designs, novelty items can always bring great surprise to gift receivers. Generally, they look this way but work totally the other way. This is the very charm of such products. When you see them at the first glance, you find it hard to identify their real functions. Then with great curiosity you try to dig out what they are and how they work. The whole process can be really exciting. In addition, they are always an amazing decoration for your room, your office or your home. Finally, they are usually easy to afford! Now you understand why we believe novelty items are the top choice for Christmas 2012?

If you do not take a good look at the novelty items yourself, it is hard to image what kind of products can be “novel”. So the best way to get inspiration is to check out the novelty item collections one by one. Generally, you can get a basic idea about what the product is or what it is used for from the item title. Anyway, you need to read the item description in order to uncover the details on how they work.

Though lots of Chinese online shops carry novelty items, most put them under various categories and you have to spend much time and work very hard to spot them. So far we have only found two sites that have an exclusive channel for all kinds of novelties: Aliexpress.com and Dinodirect.com. Both sites are well-known big players in the Chinese international online trading arena. In particular, the Novelty Items zone at Aliexpress.com seems to be one of their most widely visited areas and they have been giving great prominence to this category since they were founded.

Aliexpress.com

The novelty items at this site are sorted into three major categories: novel toys, novel households and novel consumer electronics. Here are some of the most popular novelty items there:

Page-by-page LED Lamp

Continue reading Novelty Items: A Good Choice for 2012 Christmas Gifting