People shop in a mall in Shanghai on Saturday as the city gears up to promote consumption. It plans to hold a shopping festival on May 5 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be big discounts online and at physical stores. Alibaba said discounts it offers will help Shanghai consumers save about 2 billion yuan ($282 million) during the festival. Photo: IC

China's largest mid-year shopping festival, known as 618, kicked off on Monday, with pre-sale volumes on Alibaba's Tmall e-commerce site skyrocketing 515 percent year-on-year within an hour.

The 618 promotion, named for the date of the first event, June 18, is more important for small e-commerce this year as it is the first large-scale shopping festival since the outbreak of COVID-19.

More than 100,000 brands are signed up for the event on Tmall, double last year's number, with the stores set up by governments of nine countries including Russia, Singapore and Thailand joining in the online retailing festival for the first time, the company said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Monday.

China in late April opened two more land border ports between Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Vietnam to hasten the import of fresh products like fruits from Thailand. The new ports can handle thousands of trucks a day, and a new cold-chain freight train started operating on May 21 from Tongdeng in Vietnam to Pingxiang in Guangxi as Thailand is expecting big sales of fresh fruits like durian and mango during the shopping event. 

The shopping festival will last till June 20.

During the event, Tmall will cooperate with local governments and brands to issue a large scale discount coupons and subsidies worth over 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), it said.

These measures to promote consumption are expected to spur consumer enthusiasm which has been depressed while people were under lockdown and the macro-economy faced downward pressure before the virus came under control in China.

On Tmall, pre-sales of consumer electronics and home appliances exceeded 100 million yuan within just seven minutes on Monday, while cosmetics pre-sales surpassed 500 million yuan in the same time.

E-commerce giant JD.com recently announced the platform aims to help 100,000 small- and medium-sized brands grow their sales by over 100 percent during 618 through measures like special resources and loans.

On May 10, JD.com said it would invest 1.2 billion yuan to boost smaller brands' digital transformations, providing support in aspects such as marketing, capital and operations.