The third Double Five Shopping Festival finally kicked off in Shanghai on July 31. As a comprehensive shopping event in Shanghai that involves tens of thousands of local enterprises, stores, and consumers, the Double Five Shopping Festival is different from general online shopping festivals in that it is a joint effort of the Shanghai Municipal Government and multiple entities by organizing key business hubs and coordinating district governments, enterprises, associations, and financial service institutions.

Professor Su Taoyong from the Department of Innovation and Strategy (under preparation) of our School has recently been interviewed by The Economic Observer on the social value of the Double Five Shopping Festival against the backdrop of ongoing COVID-19 prevention and control and how it can function to promote the recovery, expansion, and upgrading of consumption.

One of the characteristics of the Double Five Shopping Festival this year is the increased emphasis on digital empowerment. According to Professor Su Taoyong of the School of Economics & Management, Tongji University, many enterprises have begun to consciously use the concept and technology of the metaverse this year, to enhance the interactive experience with consumers and explore new scenarios and applications for consumption.

The debut services this year include the in-store local life service. In Su’s view, the attention to the community business forms is in line with the law of commercial development. In the past, community commerce was mainly in the form of small roadside stores and community stores and later began to appear in the form of more intensive and larger-scale supermarkets and shopping centers. However, with the decrease in price sensitivity, consumers began to request a more convenient and refined shopping experience, therefore, the last-mile-consumption business forms began to attract more attention, and compared to community consumption in the previous stage, this stage puts more emphasis on experience and efficiency increase with the help of digital technology.

For Dada Group participating in the Double Five Shopping Festival for the third year, it has fixed the processes and mechanisms for planning, publicizing, and promoting activities and coordinating, allocating, and optimizing resources. In Su’s view, the legitimacy given by the government to the Shopping Festival has enabled it to attract the participation of numerous social subjects, and the resources of the subjects are effectively allocated under the unified regulation of the government, thereby realizing the value of all beneficiaries, including society, economy, politics, and culture.

According to the data, during the first Double Five Shopping Festival in 2020, the total offline material consumption in Shanghai reached RMB 284.6 billion, up 11.6% on a monthly basis, basically restoring to the level of the same period in 2019; the online retail sales in the municipality reached RMB 255.1 billion, up 23.5% on a monthly basis. In May 2021, the total retail sales of consumer goods in Shanghai grew by 15.7% year on year and 16.4% compared to the same period in 2019, with both online and offline retail sales growing by more than 10%.

According to Su, the Double Five Shopping Festival is more than a festival; it has become the IP brand of Shanghai’s shopping festival. Therefore, it is crucial to continue and accumulate and enrich the content of the IP. Furthermore, according to the experience of the first two sessions, it can effectively promote consumption. Therefore, the Double Five Shopping Festival is an important vehicle to restore, expand, and upgrade consumption against the backdrop of ongoing COVID-19 prevention and control.

The Shanghai Double Five Shopping Festival this year is even more appealing with the support of the Ministry of Commerce. The International Consumption Season 2022 is launched at the same time. This, in Su’s view, is in fact sending a message that the government will further promote the consumption to drive the economy and the role of consumption as the corner stone of stable economic operation will become more significant. The Double Five Shopping Festival is also one of the important footholds for Shanghai to take the lead in building itself into an international consumption center.

Then, is the Double Five Shopping Festival really effective in boosting consumption and restoring consumer confidence in the current stage? According to Su, what support the Shopping Festival are essentially goods of better quality, better user experience, and deeper exploration into intelligent and digital technologies. Therefore, a successful Shopping Festival is more meaningful. Furthermore, consumer demand still exists, and at this moment when consumption becomes more rational, enterprises should explore how to provide better goods, explore new scenarios and applications of consumption, and consider how to increase overall efficiency and contribute to commercial retail innovation through digital means.