Alipay Lines Up 15 Countries for Double 12 Shopping Festival

You’ve heard of a Hallmark holiday; well, wait until you get a load of an Alipay holiday known as the Double 12 Global Shopping Festival. Alipay dropped word of this to us recently, and laid out how this surprisingly massive festival would cover a large swath of Asia and call in several other firms to help out.

The Double 12 Global Shopping Festival will be making appearances of some kind—they’re referred to as “campaigns for…local e-wallet users”—in four different continents. Alipay will be calling in help from Paytm in India, as well as GCash in the Philippines and Thailand’s TrueMoney system. AlipayHK will also be active in Hong Kong to help develop the local services.

That’s an expansive campaign, and it gets better: the Double 12 Shopping Festival will feature fully 10,000 merchants in both Macau and Hong Kong offering special deals for the season, with said discounts running through December. One special feature will involve the Mongkok district of Hong Kong, which will feature “Hong Kong snacks for 1 RMB”.

Alipay’s general manager for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, Venetia Lee, commented “Our aim is to provide a seamless payment and travel experience to millions of Alipay users who constantly travel to the Greater Bay Area. We will plan to launch more integrated campaigns to further enhance our user experience and bring more value to our merchant network in the region.” One report says that most of the best Double 12 promotions will run in the Greater Bay Area.

It’s unclear how well this will work. After all, the region just got off one major such event with Singles’ Day about a month ago, so firing up a whole new shopping festival a month later may not have the impact that Alipay et al would hope for. It’s possible, of course; there could be sufficient pent-up demand to make a second blast feasible, but the more this kind of thing is done, the more likely it is to fizzle out at any given time.

Alipay might be relying just a bit too much on the big shopping event, and may want to consider smaller bursts throughout the year to regulate demand. Still, this could work, at least in the short term.