June 19 (NBD) -- Sales battle among Chinese e-commerce giants including Tmall, JD.com and Pinduoduo during the 618 Mid-year Shopping Festival came to an end on Tuesday.

The 18-day promotion event, which was originated by JD.com in 2004, became another online shopping carnival this year after the Double 11 Shopping Festival.

Unlike 2018 when the sales race was mainly between market dominators Tmall and JD.com, the year 2019 saw more players participating in to grab market shares in the festival.

Pingduoduo, as a rising rival, announced on Wednesday that the platform received 1.1 billion orders in the past 18 days and the gross merchandise volume (GMV) registered a year-over-year rise of 300 percent.

While JD.com posted a whopping 201.5 billion yuan (29.2 billion U.S. dollars) of sales during the festival, Tmall emphasized over 100 brands saw their trading volume on the platform surpass that during last year's Double 11 Shopping Festival, with the highest surge being more than 40 times.

Online retailer Suning also said its number of orders received jumped by 133 percent compared with the figure for the same period of the previous year.

Photo/Shetuwang

National Business Daily noticed that facing the intensified competition, e-commerce platforms tried every trick in the book to woo consumers.

Subsidy offering is one of the most common strategies taken by online retailers. Tmall offered 100 million yuan worth of red packets and 10 billion yuan worth of coupons every day during the festival. JD.com handed out tens of billions of coupons in the period, with the largest single red packet worth nearly 50,000 yuan. Besides, it poured 500 million yuan to hold a cross-city online promotion event covering 367 cities in China.

New player Pinduoduo, together with brand manufacturers, provided 10 billion yuan of subsidies for 10,000 best-selling products.

Scrambling for new users in third-tier and smaller cities becomes another key strategy for e-commerce giants.

A report from QuestMobile shows the growth rate of MAU (monthly active users) in the mobile Internet market was slowing down, from 17.1 percent in January 2017 to 4.2 percent for last December. The monthly active devices used in third-tier and smaller cities numbered 618 million, 54.7 percent of the total. This pushed e-commerce platforms to enhance efforts to attract young consumers in lower-tier cities.

Pinduoduo revealed about 70 percent of orders it received during the 618 festival were from third-tier cities and below.

It is noteworthy that though e-commerce sites delivered outstanding sales performance for the festival, the carnival didn't significantly benefit merchants.

For online sellers, the shopping festival means massive money burn. The long promotion period required a large amount of advertising costs to boost sales, which could barely covered by earnings gained in the event.

Some disclosed that the user traffic of their online shops during the promotion was less than half of the usual traffic flow. "We expected to sell 1 million yuan of goods, but products actually sold were worth only 300,000 yuan. It is not possible to offset the promotion costs."

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn