Singles' Day without a store in China

Start by separating two things the guides treat as one. Selling into China and being visible in China are different projects.

Selling needs an entity, a listing and a logistics chain behind it. KAWO's Double 11 guide and iClick both assume that chain exists. That is months of work. It is not a November decision.

Being visible is cheaper. It starts the day you publish. Chinese shoppers research on Xiaohongshu before they buy anywhere, including abroad and through cross-border channels that exist whether or not you set them up. A brand with nothing on the platform returns no results when somebody searches its name in Chinese.

That is the realistic goal for November. Not a campaign. A presence that answers the question a searcher is already asking, so the demand has somewhere to land.

It changes the measure too. Nobody should be counting sales on the twelfth. Count whether your name returns notes rather than nothing, and whether anyone asked a question underneath them.

Singles' Day is 11 November and the sale is not one day. iClick's account of the Xiaohongshu calendar splits it into four stages. Seeding from 20 September, pre-heat in mid-October, a peak from late October to early November, and an extension through the second half of the month.

The extension stage is the one that matters most to anybody arriving late, and it is the one every guide gives the least space to. Buying carries on well past the eleventh, and the notes that get read in the second half of November are the ones about what people actually bought.

The marketplace pre-sale dates move every year. They still show the shape. KAWO records that in the 2022 cycle Kuaishou opened pre-sales on 13 October, JD and Pinduoduo on the 20th, and Tmall and Douyin on the 24th. That is a 2022 calendar, not this year's. By the time the day arrives, weeks of buying have already happened.

So the practical reading is that you are not late for the extension. You are late for the part you could not have done anyway.

The short version, because we have written the long one already. A note is closer to a short review than to a photograph with a caption.

The cover image carries text. On Instagram, text burned into the image reads as an advert. On Xiaohongshu it reads as a title, because that is what the format is, and a cover with nothing written on it gives a browsing reader no reason to tap.

The body is long by Instagram standards. A paragraph or several, first person, honest about the parts that are not perfect. Posts that read as marketing get scrolled past.

It is also a search engine. That is the difference that trips up most Western brands. People type a category and a problem into it the way they would into Google. The words matter as much as the picture. A note in English returns nothing for anybody searching in Chinese.

For 11.11 the format that performs is the shopping list. iClick describes native storytelling built on real experience, and the agency guides agree that a list of what to buy, with reasons, beats a single product advert. A brand can write one about its own range, as long as it says that is what it is.

Three weeks buys a small library and somebody to answer the comments. Reasonable to own by the end of November. Unreasonable to expect sales from by the eleventh.

Write five or six notes rather than one. One brand introduction, three on individual products, and one shopping list that puts them together. Written in Simplified Chinese from the brief rather than translated, because a translated English post reads as exactly that.

Decide where the buying happens before you publish, and say so in the note. Your own site with international shipping, with the shipping time given honestly. Or a stockist, named. A note that strands the reader is worse than no note.

Then stay for the comments. The questions underneath are the mechanism, and they arrive in Chinese. Somebody has to answer within a day or two. That person has to exist before you publish.

What we do is the writing and the design, in Simplified Chinese, handed to you ready to publish from your own account. The service page sets out how Chinese social media posts work and why we hand over rather than publish. There are also Chinese-language versions of this site if you want to see the writing before commissioning any.

Keep publishing through the extension stage. The second half of November is when people post what arrived and search for what they nearly bought. It is the cheapest attention in the cycle, because the brands with budgets have stopped spending.

Mobile is the whole of it. Obvious, and still missed. Shopify's Singles' Day guide cites ninety per cent of purchases made on phones, attributed to Marketing Dive, on a page dated 2021. Old, and nobody expects the direction to have reversed. If your site is slow on a phone over a Chinese connection, that is the thing to fix before you write anything.

Then look at the right number. Not sales. Whether a search for your brand name in Chinese returns notes, how many questions arrived, and what they asked about. The questions are the most useful thing 11.11 will give a brand that arrived late, because they tell you what next year's notes should answer.

Start the next one in September. That is the real lesson of the calendar, and it is the one thing on this page that costs nothing to act on.