Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize hosted what it described as a ‘new Dutch holiday’ on its bol.com website on Saturday, to coincide with Singles Day, the mammoth online shopping event in China.
The retailer said that the event, ‘The holiday for you’, was developed to encourage consumer to treat themselves, and featured the motto ‘I love me’.
“We can tell by online search results that people in the Netherlands are becoming more and more interested in Singles Day," commented Huub Vermeulen, brand president of bol.com.
"It combines the continued need for good deals with the recognition that we need to treat ourselves well. Bol.com has had a lot of success introducing Black Friday to our customers in the past and we expect Singles Day to be just as popular.”
Offers were available in categories such as makeup, perfume, jewellery, electronics, books and DVDs on the day.
Great Value
Commenting on the move, Cor Molenaar, an economist and professor of e-Marketing at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University said, “I expect that Singles Day will be of great economic value for the Netherlands in a number of years. Ultimately other retailers in the country will benefit from bol.com having introduced the world’s biggest shopping event to the Dutch market.”
Chinese commerce giant Alibaba has said that it generated around $25 billion worth of sales for this year’s Singles Day, with the first $2 billion being generated in the first few minutes of the event.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine
