China Biggest Sale Day? List of Chinese Shopping Holidays

Did you know that Singles’ Day alone generates more sales than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined?

It is the most famous shopping festival in China, but it isn’t the only one. Chinese shoppers now have a full calendar of sales moments to choose from, and each one behaves differently.

These festivals are rooted in Chinese culture and carry real sales potential over a short window. For a foreign brand, they are also one of the fastest ways to get in front of Chinese consumers who are already primed to buy.

Our agency, GMA, has run digital marketing and e-commerce campaigns in China for over a decade. We treat these dates the way a retailer treats the holiday quarter: this is where a year’s plan gets made or missed.

Below, I’ll walk you through China’s main shopping festivals, what changed about them in 2026, and which one is actually worth your budget.

I’ve been running shopping festival campaigns for foreign brands in China since 2012, from a first Tmall launch to a brand’s fourth Singles Day. The festival with the biggest name is rarely the one that makes the most money for a smaller brand.

What are the most popular shopping festivals in China?

Singles Day or 11.11 Shopping Festival

Every year on 11.11, Chinese people celebrate this iconic shopping festival, the biggest of its kind in the world.

Created as a way for university students to celebrate being single, Double 11 became an annual event thanks to Alibaba’s promotion. Some of the largest discounts of the year land during this festival, and pre-sales now start weeks in advance.

For most brands, Singles Day is still the single biggest source of yearly growth in China. But the shape of the festival has changed. Online GMV grew 17.5% year on year in 2025, with Alibaba holding around 55% of the total and JD.com about 29%, according to eMarketer. That is real growth, but slower than the double-digit jumps of the early 2010s. Neither Tmall nor JD.com now publishes an official total transaction figure, they release selective numbers instead, like the count of brands crossing 100 million RMB in sales, according to 36Kr. The headline “biggest day” number matters less than it used to. What matters is whether your own brand’s sales moved.

If you’re planning your first 11.11, start with our breakdown of the best-selling product categories during Singles Day, and if JD.com is part of your platform mix, our guide to winning Singles Day on JD.com covers the operational side: inventory, customer service staffing, and the pre-sale waves that now stretch the event over more than a month.

The Spring Festival

Chinese New Year is the most important holiday in China, and the longest one, when most people travel home to celebrate with their families. It follows the lunar calendar, usually landing in January or February, and closes with the Lantern Festival.

Because it is the most important holiday, domestic and international brands don’t just post New Year wishes, they build offers around it.

Each year is represented by one of the 12 zodiac animals, and many brands release limited packaging, patterns, or products tied to that year’s animal.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day started in the West, but it’s now firmly established among couples in China, and it isn’t limited to one day. Men and women both shop for it, and the best-selling categories are jewelry, watches, accessories, cosmetics, and makeup.

Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mooncake Festival, also called the Mid-Autumn Festival, has been celebrated for over 3000 years across several Asian cultures. It falls on the 8th month of the Chinese calendar, during a full moon, and families and friends exchange gifts. Brands often design limited packaging or their own mooncakes for the occasion.

Below is one of GMA’s own case studies: Lyfen snacks, with a limited-edition packaging designed solely for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

618 Mid-Year Shopping Festival

The 618 shopping festival was started by JD.com, as a direct answer to Alibaba’s Singles Day. It began as a marketing push and grew into China’s second biggest retail promotion after 11.11, with Taobao, Tmall, and other platforms now joining in.

The festival opens with a pre-sale in mid-May, giving brands a full month of promotion ahead of the main event on June 18.

In 2026, 618 kept growing but the growth moved category by category rather than everywhere at once. On JD.com, six major appliance brands, including Midea, Haier, Hisense, TCL, Gree, and Xiaomi, each crossed 1 billion RMB in sales, and AI-related and 3C “trend” products doubled year on year, according to IT Home. If your product sits anywhere near electronics, smart devices, or home appliances, 618 is currently the strongest date on the calendar. If it doesn’t, the uplift is far more modest.

For the complete operational calendar of all twelve key e-commerce dates, including the ones not covered in depth here, see our guide to China’s e-commerce sales dates.

818 Shopping Festival

818 is held every year on the 18th of the 8th month. It was created by Suning to mark its company anniversary. Other major players, like Douyin and Tmall, later created their own version and turned it into a shopping festival in its own right. It still hasn’t gone global, which means less competition for a foreign brand willing to show up early.

Double 12 or Couples Day

12.12, or Couples Day, is China’s version of Cyber Monday, the way Singles Day echoes Black Friday.

With only six weeks left in the year and Singles Day already behind them, brands push bigger promotions to clear end-of-year stock.

8th March Women’s Day & 7th March Girl’s Day

International Women’s Day, March 8th, has grown into a shopping festival for brands focused on female consumers. Many e-commerce platforms run campaigns around the theme.

In China, Women’s Day is generally seen as a holiday for older women, which left younger women feeling left out. So a group of students created Girls’ Day on March 7th to celebrate being young. It spread quickly, and while it’s still not an official shopping festival, major e-commerce platforms now run dedicated deals around it.

99 Wine Festival

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, once declared September the month for wine and spirits sales. It’s called “99 wine” because the number 9 sounds like the word for wine in Mandarin.

Tmall runs discounts on alcohol from the 1st to the 9th of September. Both traditional Chinese spirits, like Baijiu, and international wine brands take part.

520 Shopping Festival

In Mandarin, “520” sounds close to “I love you.” So May 20th is known as China’s I Love You Day.

It’s typically a couples’ occasion, but it also covers family and friends. Its popularity moves up and down year to year, but it’s one of the least crowded festivals on the calendar, which is exactly why it works well for smaller brands. More on that below.

National Day Golden Week

Every year, October 1st marks China’s National Day, honoring the country’s founding in 1949. It’s a national holiday that runs a full week, known as Golden Week, when hundreds of millions of people travel and shop.

Brands roll out special deals and promotions during this window, from large shopping malls down to local convenience stores and every e-commerce channel in between. Travel-linked spending, hotels, transport, tourist goods, tends to spike alongside regular retail during this specific week, more than during any other festival on this list.

What’s actually changing about these festivals in 2026

Three things are different now compared to five years ago, and they change how you should plan.

First, the “biggest sale day” framing is fading. Tmall and JD.com have both stopped publishing a single headline transaction number, and instead release selective figures that make each of them look strong in a specific category. Treat any single “record year” claim with some caution, and measure your own account instead of the market total.

Second, Douyin has reshaped the competitive order. Its e-commerce arm is projected to cross 4 trillion RMB in GMV, up roughly 20% from 3.5 trillion in 2024, overtaking JD.com to become China’s third-largest e-commerce platform, closing the gap with Pinduoduo, according to Eastmoney’s market coverage. Douyin sells through content and interest, not a fixed calendar date, which means a brand’s “festival” on Douyin can be any day its content performs.

Third, and this is the one that catches most foreign brands off guard: a shopping festival campaign that starts on the festival date has already lost. Search interest, content seeding, and private domain reactivation all need to start weeks ahead. Our piece on why brands are shifting spend from Tmall to Douyin goes deeper into how this changes platform selection, not just festival timing.

• Stop planning around a single mega-date. Plan around the two or three festivals that fit your product and margin.
• Measure your own sales lift, not the market’s headline GMV.
• Start content and search visibility three to four weeks before the date, not the week of.
• Treat smaller, less crowded festivals (520, 818, Girls’ Day) as real budget lines, not afterthoughts.

The 2026 playbook: what actually drives festival sales now

Get found before the festival starts

Two search behaviors matter now that didn’t exist five years ago. The first is AI search: platforms like DeepSeek and Doubao answer product questions directly, pulling from content that’s structured clearly, with real specifics rather than vague marketing language. If your product pages and articles read like they were written to be quoted, in short, factual paragraphs, they get pulled into these AI answers more often. This is what people mean by GEO, generative engine optimization: writing to be cited by an AI answer, not just to rank on a results page.

The second is Xiaohongshu, which now behaves like a search engine for gift and purchase decisions. Around 200 million users a month actively look for purchase advice on the platform, opening the app an average of 16 times a day, according to data shared at Xiaohongshu’s own 2026 business conference. A well-optimized note published three weeks before 520 or Valentine’s Day is still showing up in search results months later. That’s the opposite of a paid ad, which stops the moment you stop paying.

Our guide to using Xiaohongshu as a search engine covers the specific ranking factors: image-to-text ratio, the first comment under your own note, and hashtag clustering.

Reactivate your private domain instead of buying all new traffic

Most foreign brands treat every festival as a new-customer acquisition event and spend accordingly on ads. That’s expensive, and it ignores the customers you already have. WeChat’s private domain, your Official Account followers, Mini Shop customers, and private groups, converts faster during a festival because that audience already trusts you. In 2025, brand-led sales through WeChat Mini Shop grew roughly 4.3 times faster than the platform’s overall growth rate, meaning brands actively working their existing audience pulled far ahead of brands treating WeChat as a broadcast channel.

The mechanism is simple: a festival-specific offer sent directly to an Official Account follower base or a private group has none of the discovery cost of a cold ad, and it converts an audience that’s already warm. Our breakdown of WeChat Mini Shop walks through setting up Channels, Official Account, Mini Shop, and private groups as one connected system rather than four separate tools.

Let KOCs and small creators do the selling

A single big KOL placement used to be the default festival tactic. It still works for 11.11, where competition and CPCs are at their yearly peak. For smaller festivals like 520, 818, or Girls’ Day, a different mechanism works better: dozens of KOCs, small creators with a few thousand to a few hundred thousand followers, paid on commission through the platform’s own affiliate system rather than a flat fee.

The economics explain why it works. You only pay when a sale happens, the content feels like a genuine recommendation rather than an ad, and because these festivals have less advertising noise, a KOC’s post has a real chance of being seen without you paying to boost it. This is why 520 and 818, festivals with lower name recognition abroad, can outperform 11.11 on cost per acquisition for a smaller brand.

Use AI customer service to survive the volume spike

A festival multiplies your inbound questions by ten or more in a matter of days: sizing, stock, delivery dates, whether a coupon stacks with a discount. Most of these are repetitive, and an AI-driven customer service layer can answer them instantly in Mandarin, at any hour, freeing your human staff for the questions that actually need judgment, like a large B2B order or a complaint. Response speed also feeds directly into your store’s ranking on Tmall and JD.com, so a faster reply during the festival window isn’t just a service improvement, it’s a visibility one.

Case study: how a Polish jewelry brand found a festival that actually worked

Agata runs a Polish amber jewelry brand that opened a Tmall Global store in 2024. Traffic was steady but unremarkable, and she assumed 618 would be the moment that changed things.

It wasn’t. Her 618 2025 campaign, a straightforward 20% storewide discount with no content built up ahead of it, brought in about 3% of that month’s revenue during the promotion window. Industry benchmarks she’d been given suggested she should expect closer to 15 to 20%. She’d competed on price, on a date where every other jewelry seller was also competing on price, with a fraction of their ad budget.

What changed her results wasn’t a bigger discount. It was switching her main push to 520, a festival with a fraction of 11.11’s or 618’s advertising competition, and starting three weeks early instead of on the day. She published a run of Xiaohongshu notes built around search terms like amber jewelry gift ideas, timed for the pre-festival search spike, and paired the festival date itself with a flash offer sent only to her existing WeChat Official Account followers.

The 520 campaign drove close to four times the single-day revenue of her earlier 618 discount push. More importantly, the Xiaohongshu notes kept ranking and kept converting for roughly six weeks after 520 had passed, because search traffic doesn’t stop the day a paid campaign ends. Lower competition plus content that keeps working after the date, that combination is what made the difference, not a deeper discount.

Questions we get asked about China’s shopping festivals

Which festival should a new foreign brand target first?
Not 11.11. It has the highest competition and ad costs of the whole year, and a first-time seller usually gets outbid by established players before they’ve even built an audience. Start with a smaller, less contested date that fits your product, 520 for gifting categories, 818 for anything without a strong domestic Chinese following yet, and use it to build the audience and reviews you’ll need before tackling Singles Day.

Do I need a big discount to win during these festivals?
No. Discount depth matters far less than timing and visibility. A brand that shows up in Xiaohongshu search results three weeks before the date, with an active WeChat follower base to reactivate, regularly outperforms a brand offering a deeper discount with no pre-festival content.

How early should I start preparing content for a festival?
Three to four weeks minimum for search-driven platforms like Xiaohongshu and Baidu, since content needs time to index and start ranking. For 11.11 specifically, plan three to four months ahead: inventory, customer service staffing, and paid media all need lead time given how long the pre-sale period now runs.

Is 11.11 still worth it for a small or mid-size brand?
Often yes, but not as your only date. Treat it as the moment you convert an audience you’ve already built through the year, rather than the moment you try to build that audience from zero. A brand with no prior Xiaohongshu presence, no WeChat followers, and no track record on the platform will struggle to compete on 11.11 alone.

Want to build a festival calendar that fits your brand?

GMA plans and runs shopping festival campaigns for foreign brands across Tmall, JD.com, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, from picking the right dates to KOC seeding and private domain reactivation. We’ve built festival calendars for food, cosmetics, and jewelry brands entering China, matched to their margins rather than the biggest date on the calendar.

If you want a shopping festival calendar built around what your product and budget can actually support, leave us a comment or contact us. Let’s keep in touch.