Singles Day and Consumer Spending Offline

We study the spending response at offline retailers to China's Singles Day, the world's largest E-Commerce shopping holiday. Consumer's credit and debit card spending at the brick-and-mortar stores increases by 10.6% on the Singles Day during 2013-2017. The increase is concentrated in physical retail goods, with no effect in categories unaffected by online shopping promotions such as dining, entertainment, and travel. The response is prevalent throughout the years and across consumer demographics and preferences. Exploiting O2O integration events that allow us to control for online-offline difference in product access and pricing, consumer offline spending experienced a strong and persistent increase on the Singles Day primarily for the shopping-experience-dependent products. Despite large(r) price promotions offered online, the offline spending (via bank cards) on the Singles Day amounts to over 60% of Alibaba's same-day online sales in our sample period