A 2,400-Yuan Down Jacket in the Mall, 1,370 Yuan Online: Showrooming Comes for China's Retail
A tech blogger's post about his parents finding a down jacket in a mall for 2,400 yuan — the same one sells online for 1,370 — has become the emblem of Double 11's new reality: consumers who browse offline and buy online, and physical stores that cannot win the price comparison.
The post that captured China's Double 11 this year was written by a tech blogger and was about his parents. They went to a shopping mall, liked a down jacket, and saw the price: 2,400 yuan. His mother asked him to check the online price, so he uploaded a photo and searched. The same jacket, in the same brand's Tmall flagship store, cost 1,600 yuan. After the latest promotion, 1,370.
A gap of one or two hundred yuan (一两百块), he wrote in the post, and his parents might have bought it in the store; a gap of a thousand, and it is very hard to buy offline. The post has been liked more than 5,000 times.
The story has a name in retail economics: showrooming — using the physical store as a fitting room, then buying online. What is new in China is how ordinary it has become. Another shopper described the refinement of the tactic: try the size in the store, then go home and order online with the coupons stacked.
The responses show the retailer's dilemma from the other side. One shopper found that a chain clothing store's online store offered to let her collect her order in a physical branch — but if she chose self-collection, the online discount vanished and she paid the offline price, a difference of 40 to 50 yuan per item. "可以卖的贵，但是我不能买贵了" — you can sell expensive, she wrote, but I cannot buy expensive. The post has been liked more than 500 times.
The context is an eighteenth Double 11 that everyone agrees is calmer. This year's festival, as Baidu's trending board put it, "no longer frenzies": consumers order by need, the promotion period stretches on for weeks, and the industry has moved from a traffic contest to a value contest. Deutsche Welle's China coverage reported that the festival overall looks flat, with AI now being used to nudge careful consumers to spend. And the price games are not only offline: a reporter's investigation published on November 11 confirmed that some products are marked up before the sale — one consumer's air conditioner was 331 yuan more expensive in the "sale" than before.
The blogger's own solution has a straight logic: unify prices online and offline, and let the online revenue subsidise the physical store's rent and staff. That is the global answer to showrooming that has been tried, with mixed results, for a decade. China's malls will now run the same experiment, with an audience that has already learned to photograph the price tag and search it.