Delivery firms brace for busy week after China’s Singles Day shopping

Global Business

More than 20 billion packages were delivered in China in 2015, and this number is expected to soar to 30 billion after this year’s Double Eleven (November 11) online shopping frenzy, also known as Single’s Day.

CCTV’s Hu Nan reports from Shanghai.

Last year’s “double eleven” holiday saw more than 90 billion yuan or about $13.2 billion in purchases in one day, setting a record for online shopping. Packages piled up and were stuck for weeks at transit centers of every express delivery company in the country.

This year many e-commerce companies are hoping for a smooth delivery process.

Based in Shanghai, ZTO is one of China’s biggest express delivery service providers.

This year, ZTO hired more than 10,000 seasonal workers for the holiday. It also launched 16 sets of laser scan sorting lines to cope with the hundreds of millions of packages expected in the coming week.

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“We designed and developed this sorting line independently. In the past, 200 sorting workers could process 20,000 packages per hour, now it takes only 35 workers to process 24-thousand packages,” ZTO Express Supervisor Wang Quanfa said.

Now that Double Eleven is over, many merchants are now preparing for “Black Friday” – the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

“We are promoting the ‘Black Friday’ sales campaign to target overseas purchasing needs other than domestic market, which is dominated by ‘Double eleven’ already,” Ymatou.com Co-founder Cai Hua said.