Alibaba and JD.com did not share 2023 GMV figures for 618, China's second largest shopping festival; the companies previously used GMV to trumpet their wins
Tracy Qu / South China Morning Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
Alibaba and JD.com had already begun stepping back from marquee-event scorekeeping: Alibaba withheld a full Singles' Day total in 2022, describing GMV as roughly in line with the prior year instead. The 618 decision extends that earlier break from full festival GMV disclosure to another major retail event.
The shift became a repeatable reporting posture later in 2023, when both companies cited Singles' Day sales growth without an overall event-revenue figure. That makes 618 less a one-off communications choice than an early signal of more selective festival metrics.
First-order effects
- Alibaba and JD.com remove the headline benchmark that had made their 618 performances directly comparable, leaving investors, merchants, and rivals with less visibility into festival scale.
- The companies can emphasize narrower operating or growth indicators rather than a single GMV total, reducing the immediate reputational stakes of winning the event.
Second-order effects
- Third-party data providers and marketplace sellers gain more importance as alternative sources for judging demand, because company-reported festival totals no longer provide a common reference point.
- Competitors face less pressure to match a public GMV arms race, while analysts must rely more on non-GMV disclosures and comparable business metrics.
Third-order effects
- If sustained, selective disclosure can shift China’s large shopping festivals from public volume contests toward less standardized measures of platform performance and merchant activity.
- The later first reported decline in total 618 GMV shows why a common, independently sourced benchmark may become more consequential when platform disclosures recede, though it cannot establish the companies' motives for this 2023 decision.
The trend: China’s major e-commerce platforms are moving away from festival GMV as the dominant public measure of competitive success.