How Fresh-Food E-Commerce Sites Turned 7/17 Into a Shopping Festival

You may need only one reason to shop, but they are happy to invent thousands for you.

Handmade peanut brittle for 7.17 yuan, a juicer for 717 yuan, a yogurt maker at 70% off... On July 17, these "foodie deals," all priced around the number 717, appeared in the "Market" section of Xiachufang.

The startup moved into e-commerce only recently. Because "7/17" sounds like "eat a bite" (chi yi chi) in Chinese, it held a three-day foodie festival on the date, called "717: Big Market, Big Deals." Ten days before it began, Xiachufang's 200-yuan red packets were already circulating on WeChat Moments. At midnight on July 16, more than a week of pent-up shopping poured into Xiachufang's Market, where items "sold out in seconds."

Several days after the "7/17" sale ended, everyone at Xiachufang's office was still working customer service. A handful of full-time customer-service staff had been working around the clock for more than ten days, and calls chasing shipments and complaining about problem orders kept coming in.

Xiachufang put its red-packet page in a prominent spot on its home page

July is an unusual month: it has no holidays. "There's no New Year and no festival," said founder Wang Xusheng. "We chose this day mainly to make our debut, to tell the whole industry and our users that we do e-commerce now."

Xiachufang was not the only e-commerce company running promotions at this time.

Xiachufang's "717 Market" was meant to tell more users that it now sells things. But this year fresh-food e-commerce sites such as Benlai Life, Fruitday and Yiguo all ran promotions around "7/17" without coordinating, and even Haier and Suning.com, which have nothing to do with food, joined in. That calls to mind how "6/18" and "Double 11" were conjured out of nothing by e-commerce companies to become online shopping festivals.

It started with an "Eat at Home" campaign

Xiachufang's Market has been online for more than six months. Asked why it chose "7/17" rather than, say, "5/17" ("I want to eat") or "7/27" ("eat and eat"), Wang Xusheng admitted it was "inspired by the fresh-food e-commerce company Benlai Life."

"Last year we joined Benlai Life's 'Eat at Home' alliance," Wang Xusheng told QDaily. "But back then we didn't join as an e-commerce company."

"This is our third year doing Eat at Home." Li Xiaoduo, general manager of Benlai Life's North China region, is one of the company's veterans. Asked how "7/17" came about, his first response was that "it actually feels pretty funny." "In the first year, we fantasized about the whole e-commerce industry creating a festival together. It came true so fast."

Benlai Life's founding team was made up mostly of former journalists. In 2012, after more than a year of research, the website was ready to launch. Spoken with a southern accent, "7/17" sounds a bit like "eat a bite" (roughly "qie yi qie"). Their business was food, so they chose that date.

In May of the following year, these journalists-turned-online-grocers began wondering how to "mark the first anniversary."

"Most of the research we did before launch was about how hard-working people in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai eat," Li Xiaoduo said. "From that, we came up with a phrase: 'Eat at Home.'"

A comic Benlai Life created in 2013 to promote "Eat at Home"

Food may be the thing in daily life that does most to stir and sustain the bonds between people. On July 17, 2013, Benlai Life called on Weibo for a "7/17 Eat at Home Day." The slogan it used to explain the idea is still in use: Eating at home is the only test of happiness.

From then on, "Eat at Home" was printed on Benlai Life's delivery boxes. Li Xiaoduo told QDaily: "Like the store logos printed on JD.com and Tmall packaging. After the first time, we raised 'Eat at Home' to the same level as the 'Benlai Life' brand."

Boxes printed with the words "Eat at Home" are everywhere in Benlai Life's office

The first "7/17 Eat at Home Day," in 2013, was mostly brand marketing presented as a public-service campaign. In their news reports, People's Daily and Xinhua referred to Benlai Life, the campaign's initiator, as "Weibo user @BenlaiLife."

After that, Benlai Life set aside one week each month as a "Life at Home" theme week. In July 2014, Benlai Life and dozens of companies across China formed an "Eat at Home" alliance, and that is when Xiachufang joined.

Beyond spreading the idea, in 2014 Benlai Life handed out more than 20,000 "Eat at Home" grocery gift packs at companies such as Google and Tencent. "There was fish, handmade dumplings and so on, worth about 80 to 100 yuan per pack," Li Xiaoduo recalled. "That alone cost about one to two million yuan." He would not give the total, but counting only two weeks of Focus Media advertising, Benlai Life's spending on "7/17" last year was already considerable.

Last summer, fresh-food e-commerce promotions centered on the World Cup, under the banner of eating while you watch. This year, in July, a month whose name sounds like "Eating Month" (chi yue), the fresh-food sites, always hunting for reasons to get users to buy a little more, have all set their sights on "7/17."

From a campaign to a festival: Benlai Life puts everything on sale this year

On more than 30,000 Beijing taxis, the cover of the latest issue of Benlai Life's in-house magazine, Benlai Life, features Sun Honglei and eating at home. Benlai Life's "7/17" marketing and discounts this year are on a much larger scale than in the previous two years.

Around 7/17, Benlai Life ran "Eat at Home" ads at the same time on Guangzhou's Canton Tower (the "Little Waist"), in Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport and in the Shanghai metro. A week before the sale began, it enlisted more than a hundred celebrities, including Sun Honglei, Wu Xiubo and Hai Qing, to stir up talk about "Eat at Home."

In fact, Benlai Life's team began preparing for this year's "7/17" as soon as last year's ended. Its new North China warehouse covers 12,000 square meters, and its new warehouses in East and South China were upgraded before last July.

When we asked which product categories were part of this year's sale, Li Xiaoduo answered in two words: "All of them." Besides price cuts, during the main days of the 7/17 event Benlai Life also offered "spend 200, get 500 back." As Li Xiaoduo put it, "For users who regularly buy three or four times a month, we can cover their groceries for the next few months."

The promotions cover almost all of July. From July 18, an anniversary sale picked up right where "7/17" left off. According to the figures available so far, Benlai Life's registered users have doubled from a quarter ago.

"But every July brings a lot of fake accounts, so we stay fairly level-headed about the numbers," Li Xiaoduo told QDaily. "Overall, we're very proud of how much we've done in these three years, how many cities we've expanded to, how many users we've reached. But what we're proudest of this year is how fast our hope that this day (7/17) would become a festival for the fresh-food e-commerce industry came true."

Fruitday uses 7/17 to announce it sells more than fruit

Xiachufang is just one example. Fruitday, which announced in May a US$70 million (about 430 million yuan) Series C round led by JD.com, also hoisted the banner of a "7/17 Fresh-Food Party."

For Fruitday, this is a theme to get consumers shopping. "It's like running a magazine: every month you have to pick a theme," Chen Jiajie, the vice president in charge of marketing, told QDaily.

Summer is already when people buy the most fruit, and July has always been a big month for promotions at fruit e-commerce companies. Now they are using the theme mainly to tell users that they are shifting from selling only fruit to selling every kind of fresh food.

On July 17, cherries alone hit 300,000 orders in half a day, far more than the team had expected. "That's more than a general e-commerce platform like Yihaodian sells on an ordinary day," Fruitday vice president Chen Jiajie told QDaily. Fruitday had planned to spend 30 million yuan on subsidies over the month; by the time of our interview yesterday, spending on discounts alone had already passed that figure.

Fruitday's "Eating Month" campaign runs until the end of the month

"On 7/17, every one of our phone lines was swamped."

"We were mentally prepared, but Chinese users' appetite for fresh food is still astonishing," said Chen Jiajie, recalling what struck him most in recent days. "It reminded me of when a fresh-food supermarket opened in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone and everyone lined up to grab lobsters. The way users behaved that day really surprised me."

Unlike Benlai Life, Fruitday picked a dozen or so of its most popular items from the more than 200 SKUs (stock-keeping units) it had sold before, and concentrated its discounts on them through group buying and flash sales. One was the cherries from the US Pacific Northwest, which accounted for the vast majority of orders in the first half day. To show that it sells more than fruit, it also featured Arctic sweet shrimp and sole fillets.

"Every big sale is a test for fresh-food e-commerce," said Chen Jiajie. "We are still very cautious about stockpiling. For this 7/17, what we most needed to prepare was the ability to react fast."

To get ready, Fruitday stocked goods at their source according to its sales estimates. As orders surged, it also stood ready to pull stock from other suppliers of the same produce. Items that were hard to restock at short notice were sold in limited quantities.

On the 17th, even servers whose bandwidth had been expanded in advance were overwhelmed. Some users found the app slow or frozen when they logged in, and Fruitday had to close the page for claiming cherry coupons early.

With a week of "Eating Month" still to go, Chen Jiajie was already convinced that "7/17" had worked. "Next year," he said, "we definitely won't miss this chance either."

Even companies that don't sell food are joining the party

Over the past year, the Chinese internet companies most eager to chase hot topics and invent festivals have been the car-hailing services.

Didi joined Benlai Life's "Eat at Home alliance," and the two published this year's "Eat at Home Survey Report" together. As Li Xiaoduo put it, Didi supplied the data on the "going home" part, and Benlai Life took care of the "eating" part.

Yongche teamed up with Volvo to launch an "Eat at Home" car service on July 17. A Yongche employee in charge of the co-branded marketing told QDaily that the two brands had worked together several times since May. Since "7/17" sounds like "eat a bite," and since people easily neglect their families because of work, they came up with this campaign.

Neither side was using "Eat at Home" as a theme for the first time

But on the day the campaign launched, most of the team running it were working overtime and still could not go home to eat.

Li Xiaoduo told QDaily that, with e-commerce sites, other businesses and the media all taking part, whether they meant to or not, this fresh-food festival has begun to take shape. At the very least, quite a few companies have accepted the idea of using this date to run food promotions, and are doing it.

Besides "eat a bite," 7/17 has other homophones, such as "together" (yiqi).

We cannot say whether Haier and Suning's "7/17" sale was inspired by the fresh-food sites. Mei Yonggang, Haier's interaction manager for China, told QDaily in a phone interview that the Haier-Suning "717 Brand Festival" was prepared under the direct guidance of Haier rotating president Liang Haishan and Suning COO Hou Enlong.

From proposal to execution, the plan took three months. With the home-appliance industry as a whole growing slowly, the goal was to "create another May Day." They picked July 17 because July has no major holidays, and the "together" homophone carried a useful hint.

As early as March this year, there were reports that the two companies had agreed on a "new alliance plan," and a Haier online team of more than 40 people moved to Suning's headquarters in Nanjing to work out marketing strategy alongside the Suning team.

Haier's full range of appliances, more than ten categories including refrigerators, freezers and color TVs, was part of the sale. Sales from the 15th to the 19th reached 400 million yuan; in effect, Haier sold almost half a month's output through Suning.

Haier and Suning's 717 Brand Day

7/17 may not be ready to become an online shopping festival yet

The world's first online shopping festival was "Cyber Monday." On the first Monday after "Black Friday," the traditional day of store discounts in the US, online retailers generally run promotions to get people to buy.

In 2005, the retail research website shop.org called these promotions "Cyber Monday," and the "festival" stuck. Nobody remembers which retailer started it.

But today's biggest e-commerce sales festival is still "Double 11," which Alibaba created in 2009. Tmall, then called "Taobao Mall," wanted to "give users a really good time." We have heard many times the story of how that "good time" became "Double 11." The 6/18 shopping festival that JD.com created soon after has, in the past two years, also become a date that every major e-commerce company braces for.

A few years ago, JD.com explained bluntly why it created "618": "We at JD.com need an online shopping festival of our own, like 'Double 11.'" Since JD.com, there has been no shortage of imitators.

SMZDM ("What's Worth Buying"), a website devoted to e-commerce shopping guides, organizes its year largely around these big festivals. Producing special features on "Double 11," "Black Friday" and "6/18" for its users is among its most important work each year.

On the 7/17 wave of promotions, Liu Yanan, SMZDM's director of public relations, told QDaily that apart from a co-branded feature with Xiachufang, its news center has not yet produced a dedicated roundup on fresh-food e-commerce this year. An employee who handled the Xiachufang partnership said consumers are still not very aware of "7/17" as a date.

Perhaps one day it will be huge.

But by Li Xiaoduo's own standard, that "every ordinary person around you is talking about it and taking part," the "7/17" foodie festival may still be a Mother's Day, or half a Valentine's Day, short of the shopping festivals the e-commerce industry widely observes, such as JD.com's 6/18 and Taobao's "Double 11" and "Double 12."

The "7/17" campaigns of Fruitday, Benlai Life and Xiachufang were not organized together. But for these companies, reminding users that they exist may matter more than the sales.

Between 6/18 and Double 11 lies a "dead zone" of several months, and this is not the first time e-commerce companies, and even brick-and-mortar shops, have tried to launch sales of their own on the back of "Double 11" and "Double 12."

Uber, another internet company fond of "creating buzz," today launched on-demand ice cream delivery in 14 Chinese cities and named this Friday "Ice Cream Day." If a festival can be named that casually, there is nothing remarkable about fresh-food sites inventing one for the sake of eating.

This year has already seen several big e-commerce celebrations, such as Jumei's "3/01," Gome Online's "4/18" and Vipshop's "4/19," and some e-commerce sites dubbed the recent "7/20" a "cross-border shopping festival." Whether or not everyone recognizes them, as consumer demand grows, these "festivals" will only multiply.

Since you are already used to opening your phone and browsing shopping sites even when you have nothing to buy, then, faced with e-commerce companies working so hard to give you an excuse to shop,

you might as well give in.

Cover image from Airmadagascar