The fever of the "Double 11" (Nov. 11, indicating Singles' Day) online shopping festival is benefitting China's winter sports market ahead of Beijing 2022.
Zhao Qiong, a marketing manager of the Secret Garden ski resort, said in an interview with Xinhua that he was "totally astonished by the significant boost of the numbers."
"We launched several live shows to introduce our ski products and services during 'Double 11'," the marketing manager said.
"In the live show, the customers seemed more likely to purchase because they could get more 'must pay reasons.' For example, we presented the work of our excellent snow making crew to them, thus let them know their experience on our piste would be excellent too," he added.
The resort, where lots of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Games skiing events are set to be held, first launched its online sales campaign during this year's "Double 11," the Chinese internet version of "Black Friday."
In Zhao's estimation, two million RMB (US$308,000) in sales income would satisfy him. However, he saw the number quickly exceed this, and finally climb over 9.4 million RMB (US$1.45 million).
Just like the Secret Garden ski resort, lots of other companies from the ski industry have joined China's biggest annual online shopping event.
According to the data from Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall, the overall sales income of ski equipment increased 100 percent in this year's "Double 11" compared to last year's volume, among which ski boots mark the most significant boost of 556 percent.
An important reason behind this growth is the recent explosion of the Chinese ski population, sped up by the approaching of Beijing 2022.
Chen Wanxia, an analyst for an internet company, is one of the so called "new ski population" and just bought her first ski suit in the "Double 11" despite having little skiing experience.
"I found more and more colleagues are talking about skiing and I've received several invitations from them to join the skiing trips, so I think it's time to have my own ski suit," said Chen.
"When searching on Tmall and watching the live shows, I also got surprised that the ski suit could be so fashionable," she added.
In a similar way with the ski industry, the utilization of the e-commerce, especially livestream sales, also contributed to the surge of Beijing 2022 licensed products sales.
The official Beijing 2022 licensed products store opened on Tmall in 2018, and is the first official online licensed products store in Olympic history.
"Almost every item sold out within seconds after the live show opened," read an Alibaba report that reviews a live show sale attended by several well-known Chinese winter sports athletes and Tmall's star Wei Ya.
"The sales number are not the most important thing for us, what we care most about is to promote the concept, culture and knowledge of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games," said Guo Lei, a section chief of the Beijing 2022 Organizing Committee's marketing department.
