This year, the 11th of November, also known as Singles' Day, falls on a Wednesday, and for most European pricing teams it still sits in the "China thing" folder. That folder is getting harder to justify. Singles' Day lands exactly 16 days before Black Friday on 27 November, which in practice is right where the run-up starts.
Our own data says the real action begins well before the big day. Across roughly 60,000 products we tracked in Germany and the Netherlands around Black Friday 2025, prices started sliding more than two weeks out. Sixteen days before Black Friday is, give or take a long weekend, 11.11.
Edoardo Passerini, Pricing and Revenue Growth Manager D2C at Philips Personal Health, put it plainly on our Black Friday podcast: Black Friday has become Black November, and he expects single-day events like 11.11 to reach Europe as more Chinese retailers enter the market. Add AI assistants that compare your prices in seconds, new EU parcel fees and the Omnibus 30-day rule, and 11.11 starts to look less like someone else's holiday and more like the opening bell.
Here's what pricing, category, and e-commerce teams in non-food retail should know before Wednesday.
Singles' Day is an online shopping event held on the 11th of November, built by Alibaba on top of a Chinese folk holiday for single people (the four ones in 11.11 are the joke). It started small: just 27 merchants on Tmall took part in the first sale in 2009, according to Alibaba's own news site Alizila.
For a decade, Alibaba released a record GMV figure every November, and the world's business press dutifully reprinted it. That stopped in 2022. Its last published number was 540.3 billion yuan for 2021, an 8.5% rise and the slowest growth the event had ever posted, after which Alibaba only said results were "in line" with the year before. The same Reuters report notes something more relevant to European pricing teams: before 2020, 11.11 was a one-day event.
It isn't anymore. Tmall's 2026 edition opened pre-sales on 15 October and started the actual sale at 8 p.m. on 20 October, with one million brands and more than 70 million products taking part, Alibaba says. Sound familiar? It's the same stretch we see in Europe, where Black Friday has turned into Black Week and then Black November.
In Europe, 11.11 arrived through two doors. The first is cross-border platforms such as AliExpress and Temu, which push 11.11 deals straight to European shoppers. The second is homegrown retailers borrowing the date. Bol.com was the first major Benelux player to do it, back in 2017, and limited the campaign to the Netherlands because 11 November is Armistice Day in Belgium, RetailDetail reported. A Nyenrode marketing professor quoted in the same piece spotted the real attraction early: 11.11 comes weeks before every other sale, and a shopper can only spend each euro once.
That local calendar matters. In Belgium and France, 11 November is a public holiday for remembrance, which makes a loud discount campaign a tone-deaf choice. In Germany, it's St. Martin's Day and the start of carnival season. A pan-European 11.11 campaign copied across markets will land differently in each, which is exactly the point Edoardo Passerini makes about running Black Friday in 14 countries: test and read each audience rather than cloning one promotion.
The short version: European prices start moving weeks before the headline day, most of the catalogue never gets a real discount, and the biggest cuts go where competition is thinnest. Two of our datasets point the same way.
We tracked roughly 60,000 products daily for six weeks around Black Friday 2025 across Germany and the Netherlands, in Consumer Electronics, Sporting Goods and Health & Beauty (full report here). Indexed to 100 on Black Friday itself, prices drifted down from the very start of the window and then bounced back to roughly 102 to 103 within about a week, most of it around Cyber Monday.
The categories took very different routes to the same low point. Consumer Electronics declined earliest and most gradually. Health & Beauty stayed flat, then dropped hard in the final week. Sporting Goods did the strangest thing: prices rose first, peaked about a month before Black Friday, then fell sharply in the final two weeks. A month before Black Friday 2026 was 28 October. Two weeks before is 13 November. Singles' Day sits right inside that window.
Two more patterns are worth carrying into 11.11. Products with dozens of competing offers clustered at modest discounts of roughly 10% to 20%, while the 40% to 60% cuts showed up almost only on products with few competing offers. And in Health & Beauty and Sporting Goods, products under €50 were discounted more often and more deeply than pricier tiers. Electronics was the exception, with discount rates fairly even across price brackets once you account for how the catalogue is spread.
Our Prime Day 2026 review covered 1.19 million products across the European market. Only 13.8% saw a genuine price cut of more than 3%. Another 11.6% got more expensive, and 74.6% didn't move at all. Among the products that were cut, the median discount was 7.8%.
Two details matter for Singles' Day. First, price hikers climbed steadily before the event and peaked at +11.1% around Prime Day. Second, discounts faded slowly: a week after the event, the median price among active discounters was still 8.3% below its pre-Prime baseline. In the Netherlands, bol.com was the one retailer whose price changes clearly mirrored Amazon's discounting on shared products, while MediaMarkt and Coolblue mostly held flat.
| What the data shows |
Black Friday 2025 (DE/NL, ~60k products) |
Prime Day 2026 (Europe, 1.19M products) |
|---|---|---|
|
When prices move |
More than two weeks before the event |
Hikers rise before the event, discounters drop during it |
|
How much of the catalogue gets a real cut |
Varies by category and price tier |
13.8% cut by more than 3% |
|
Typical depth |
10 to 20% on highly competed products |
Median cut of 7.8% |
|
How fast prices recover |
Back to ~102 to 103 within about a week |
Still 8.3% below baseline a week later |
Put those together and 11.11 looks like the first real test of the season. If your competitors follow last year's pattern, some of them will already be moving on 11 November, and the rest will be watching who blinks first.
In the EU, any price you cut on 11.11 can follow you to Black Friday. Under Article 6a of the Price Indication Directive, the "prior price" in a discount claim is the lowest price you applied in at least the 30 days before the reduction. The EU Court of Justice confirmed in September 2024, in a case referred by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, that an advertised percentage discount has to be calculated from that prior price.
Now do the calendar maths. A Black Friday discount that starts on 27 November looks back to 28 October. Wednesday 11 November sits squarely inside that window. So if you drop a product from €100 to €80 for Singles' Day, put it back to €100 on the 12th and then advertise "25% off, now €75" on Black Friday, the reference price is €80, and your real discount is about 6%.
There is one nuance. The directive lets member states treat a progressive, uninterrupted reduction as one campaign, with the prior price set before the first cut. That helps if 11.11 is genuinely the first step of a single Black November campaign. It doesn't help if prices bounce back up in between. Our sporting goods report already showed Dutch regulator ACM finding misleading discount claims at 18 of 24 large sellers it checked before Black Friday 2025, mostly around the "from" price. That's a 75% hit rate. Regulators are clearly looking.
An audience member asked whether there is a downside to many price changes in a short period. Edoardo said there is, and that it affects consumer perception. A shopper who buys at the beginning of the campaign and sees a lower price later will complain, so customer service needs to be informed and engaged in the process. On the other side, products can run out of stock during the event, so buying at the start also protects shoppers from missing out. That sense of being first should make consumers willing to pay a little more.
Three other things shape how much room you have on 11.11 this year.
Cheap cross-border parcels cost more. Since 1 July, the EU charges a €3 customs duty on low-value e-commerce parcels, and from 1 November a €2 handling fee comes on top. For a category where a Chinese platform used to set the market price on a €15 accessory, that changes the comparison. It's worth checking whether the competitors you've been matching on low-value SKUs have moved.
UK inflation is low, promotions aren't. The British Retail Consortium put UK shop price inflation at 2.1% in October, with non-food at 1.7%, and NIQ expects shoppers to lean more on promotions. The UK sits outside the EU's 30-day rule, so UK and EU strike-through logic shouldn't share a template.
Shoppers are cautious, and they shop early. Dutch iDEAL data showed about 37.8 million payments in the week before Black Friday 2025, against 6.25 million on the day itself, and HDE forecast German Black Friday and Cyber Monday spend down almost 2% last year, the first decline since its tracking began. More shoppers, earlier, with less to spend: a crowd that rewards teams who are priced right from the first week of November.
More of your 11.11 price checks this year will be done by software. In China, Alibaba built its 2026 Singles' Day around a Qwen-powered shopping assistant that is connected to the full Taobao and Tmall catalogue and helps shoppers compare products and pick promotional offers. In the West, the numbers are moving the same way.
| Signal | What it says |
|
AI-referred clicks, US holiday 2026 |
Forecast up 130% year on year over the season, and up 95% on Black Friday |
|
ChatGPT shopping prompts |
1.7 billion retail and e-commerce prompts a week; about 43% of shopping conversations involve comparing options (OpenAI's own data) |
|
Walmart |
Launched Agent Profiles, an Agent Gateway and terms for AI agents shopping on customers' behalf; says agents see the same prices as humans |
| Amazon |
Blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent on 20 September |
A word of caution on the Adobe figure, which will be quoted everywhere this month. It's US only, and it counts clicks, not share of traffic, so +130% tells you the channel is growing fast. It says nothing about how big it is. Adobe also forecasts US Black Friday online sales of $12.9 billion, up 9.2%. We already saw an early version of this at Prime Day, when US traffic from generative AI tools nearly doubled in the event's first 24 hours.
The Walmart and Amazon moves show the two strategies retailers are choosing between. Walmart is opening a formal front door for agents and promising them the same prices as people. Amazon, at least with Muse, kept one out. For a European brand or retailer, the practical question is simpler: when an agent compares 11.11 offers, will your price, stock and product data be readable, current and competitive?
Edoardo at Philips is already planning for it. His goal is for Philips' website content and reviews to be picked up by LLMs, so that when someone asks an assistant which power toothbrush to buy, Philips lands in the top three. Price is part of that answer. So is everything around it.
If shoppers bring an AI assistant to 11.11, pricing teams need one of their own. That's the idea behind agentic pricing: an AI layer that reads your pricing and market data, analyses it and explains what's going on, so the team spends its time deciding instead of digging (what agentic pricing is). We've written about the shopper side of this in When Shopping Agents Meet Pricing Agents and about the day-to-day impact on teams in How Agentic Pricing Software Changes Retail Pricing Teams.
Our version is the Omnia Agent. It's available to every Omnia customer inside Omnia 2.0. You ask a question about your pricing or market data in plain language, and it comes back with an analysed answer and the reasoning behind it. It is read-only: it explains, flags, and your team decides what changes.
That last part matters more during a peak week than any other. At Philips, which runs D2C web shops in 14 countries, finding out why a product wasn't behaving used to mean searching 14 different portals. Now the team asks the agent which decision tree a product ends up in or what is blocking it, and the agent flags products held back by a boundary so the team can judge whether that's intended (Omnia). As our consultant Rara put it in the same conversation, the decisions stay with the team, but the agent sheds light on things there was no capacity to look into before.
For the 16 days between Singles' Day and Black Friday, these are the kinds of questions worth asking on day one:
Edoardo Passerini has priced peak season at HP, Nike and now Philips Personal Health, where his team runs the D2C web shops in 14 countries. On our first Black Friday podcast, he described a campaign that is planned before the summer and runs for roughly one month in three phases, from early November into December. Four of his habits translate straight to Singles' Day.
Write the scenarios before the market moves: His biggest uncertainty every year is how early and how aggressive competitors and retailers will be. So the team agrees in advance which products may follow the market deeper and to which price point, which ones never follow, and what happens if demand outruns supply. If a competitor opens with an 11.11 cut, you execute plan B instead of holding a meeting about it.
Automate the routine, keep brand calls manual: Daily reporting and market scans are automated. Decisions on specific products, specific discounts, and paid media spend are discussed internally first. During the event, Philips also adds an extra pricing run in its top five or six countries, because the market keeps moving.
Don't let your own shop set the floor: Philips' D2C shop is aligned with market levels but should never be the cheapest. If a brand doesn't trust its own offer, it pushes retailers lower and the whole market drops. That's worth remembering when a marketplace runs a loud 11.11 campaign on your products.
Read each country on its own terms: The UK needs the biggest discount claims to trigger conversion, bundling can work in Northern Europe, and Dutch shoppers respond to one-plus-one offers. One 11.11 template across Europe will miss in at least some of them.
And his advice for the day itself: look at a few data points that really matter, act on the scenarios you prepared, and try to enjoy it. It's stressful every year anyway.
More of our podcast with Philips on our YouTube.
Treat 11 to 27 November as one campaign with three checkpoints, and decide before Wednesday what you will and won't do.