Double 11 and 618 for Foreign Brands: A Campaign Calendar for Cross-Border Stores

Double 11 and 618 are the two demand peaks that decide a cross-border store's year

Double 11 and 618 are China's two recurring, platform-wide shopping festivals, and for a foreign brand running a cross-border store they function as the year's two demand peaks around which inventory, cash flow and marketing budgets should be planned. Double 11 — the 11 November festival that began as Singles' Day — is the larger of the two; 618, which grew out of JD.com's June anniversary sale, is the mid-year counterpart. Together they no longer resemble discount days at all: each now spans roughly four to six weeks, and third-party data show the gap between them narrowing. Syntun estimated total GMV across major platforms at RMB 1.695 trillion for Double 11 2025, up 14.2 percent year on year, and RMB 855.6 billion for 618 2025, up 15.2 percent. A brand that plans around these two windows — and around the supply-chain lead times they impose — competes on different terms from one that treats them as optional promotions.

Double 11 is now a six-week season, not a single day

Double 11 is China's largest annual online shopping festival, held around 11 November but now opened in waves that start in mid-October, and the shape of the event has changed more than its size. In 2025, Tmall opened its first sales wave on the evening of 20 October; in the first hour alone, 80 brands each passed RMB 100 million in GMV, more than 30,500 brands doubled their first-hour sales versus the prior year, and nearly 19,000 brands' first-hour sales exceeded their entire 2024 festival. Kuaishou began even earlier, on 7 October. The consequence for a foreign brand is that the "day" customers actually wait for is the first wave — by the second and third waves, much of the demand has already been banked.

Cross-border participation is no longer marginal. Tmall Global reported more than 1,700 overseas brands from 43 countries and regions entering the 2025 festival, led by new arrivals from the United States, South Korea, Australia, Japan and New Zealand — and across the first three quarters of 2025 the platform added 1,724 overseas brand first-stores, about seven per day, with South Korean brand numbers up more than 40 percent year on year. The festival has also become the year's clearest demand signal: categories such as oral anti-ageing supplements and ingredient-led skincare were the ones overseas brands pushed hardest into the event.

618 is the mid-year test run that brands should not skip

618 is China's largest mid-year shopping festival, centred on 18 June but running from mid-May, and it matters to foreign brands for two reasons beyond its own GMV. First, it is a genuine demand event in its own right: in 2025, pre-sales began on 13 May — a week earlier than 2024 — and the festival produced a record RMB 855.6 billion in GMV, with Tmall ranked first, followed by JD.com, Douyin and Pinduoduo. Four hundred and fifty-three brands each exceeded RMB 100 million on Taobao and Tmall, and category data from Syntun show imported-relevant segments performing strongly: skincare at RMB 43.2 billion, perfume and colour cosmetics at RMB 14.3 billion, nutrition and health supplements at RMB 14.3 billion, and pet food at RMB 7.5 billion during the festival window.

Second, and less obviously, 618 is where the demand pattern that will repeat in November gets rehearsed. The mechanisms tested at 618 — platforms cancelling complex coupon stacking in favour of simple "official direct discounts", government consumption subsidies folded into category pricing, and content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Bilibili integrated into the conversion path — are the ones that carry into Double 11. A brand that treats 618 as a quiet period forfeits both the revenue and the learning.

Preparation is a working-backwards exercise from the first sales wave

Campaign preparation for a cross-border store is a supply-chain scheduling exercise in which every task is anchored to the date the first sales wave opens, not to the festival's calendar peak. The binding constraint is inbound logistics: goods must physically arrive in a bonded warehouse and be ready for sale before the first wave, and cross-border import volume peaks in the weeks before both festivals, when customs and quarantine capacity is at its tightest. The timeline below reflects how a 1210 bonded-model store builds toward a mid-October first wave for Double 11 — the same structure applies to 618, shifted to a mid-May first wave.

The single most common calendar failure is in the September row: bonded stock that has not arrived, or has arrived but not completed entry procedures, by early October. There is no recovery from that inside the festival — the demand simply goes to competitors whose shelves are stocked.

A 1210 cross-border store has four festival rules domestic stores never face

A 1210 bonded-model store operates under cross-border e-commerce retail import rules that change how festival demand can be captured, and foreign brands should plan around four of them specifically. First, inventory must be pre-positioned: goods arrive in bulk in a bonded warehouse before sale, and festival readiness is measured by confirmed bonded stock, not by factory capacity. Second, products must sit on the cross-border retail import positive list — the 2022 revision covers 1,476 tariff lines — so a category check belongs in the July planning step, not in October. Third, order sizes are capped: RMB 5,000 per single order and RMB 26,000 per buyer per year, with duty at zero and VAT and consumption tax charged at 70 percent of statutory rates inside those limits — an effective 9.1 percent tax for a typical 13 percent VAT good, per GACC's cross-border tax guidance. Fourth, goods are personal-use imports that cannot be resold onward, which means festival volume converts directly to end-customer orders rather than to distributor pipelines.

None of these rules is a barrier; each is a planning input. The tax advantage inside the caps is in fact one reason imported goods price competitively during festivals — but only for stores whose bonded stock, listing data and label compliance are all confirmed before the first wave opens (GACC cross-border e-commerce retail import tax Q&A, January 2026).

Budget for a season, and let content lead conversion

Festival budgeting for a foreign brand is the allocation of spend across a six-week season — content seeding first, conversion advertising second — rather than a bid for one discount day, and the platforms' own 2025 mechanics reward that order. The industry shift toward simple, transparent pricing ("official direct discounts" replacing coupon stacking) means a brand's campaign price must be defensible across the whole window, because consumers now compare across waves and across platforms with less friction than before. Retention mechanics also grew in importance: membership programmes such as Tmall's 88VIP featured heavily in 2025, and repeat purchasers convert at materially lower acquisition cost in the second and third waves.

The practical allocation that works for first-time festival brands: lock prices early and keep them stable across waves; spend four to six weeks before the first wave on KOL, Xiaohongshu and short-video seeding; concentrate paid traffic and livestream budget in the first-wave window when intent peaks; and hold a reserve for the 11 November climax, where residual demand still concentrates. Brands that invert this — heavy ad spend, no seeding, prices that drift between waves — typically pay more for the same GMV.

First-timers fail in the same three places every year

First-year festival failures for foreign brands cluster into three recognisable patterns, and each is avoidable at the planning stage. The first is stock arriving late — the September inbound deadline missed because purchase orders were placed against the calendar date of 11 November rather than the mid-October first wave. The second is pricing built for a single day: a discount so deep it erases margin for six weeks, or a price that changes between waves and triggers platform and consumer distrust. The third is treating content as an afterthought — launching conversion advertising into a cold audience in late October, then concluding that "Double 11 doesn't work for our category" when the store simply had no warmed demand to convert.

The pattern behind all three is the same: the festival is a supply-chain and content event that ends in a sales spike, not a sales event with a supply chain attached. Brands that anchor every workstream to the first-wave date — stock confirmed, prices locked, audience warmed — enter November with the only three assets that festival demand can actually convert.

Sources

• Syntun 2025 Double 11 GMV estimate and foreign-brand trends — Dao Insights
• Syntun 2025 618 sales briefing (RMB 855.6bn, category breakdown) — Sina Finance
• 618 2025 record sales and extended timeline — Reuters via Economic Times
• Double 11 as a springboard for foreign brands; Tmall Global's 1,724 new overseas brand stores — Asia-Pacific Times (HKNA)
• GACC cross-border e-commerce retail import tax Q&A (RMB 5,000/26,000 caps, 70 percent rule) — customs.gov.cn

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• How to Set Up a Tmall Global Store
• What Is 1210 Bonded Import?
• China Import Taxes and Duties Explained: A Landed-Cost Walkthrough
• China Market Entry Guide
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