Google Singapore has launched the pre-sale site for the second annual 72-hour Great Online Shopping Festival (#GOSF).

Starting today, the second edition of the festival has “Made of Happiness” as its theme, offering thousands of deals from more than 100 brands over three days.

The inaugural event last year attracted 800,000 page views from more than 400,000 shoppers, while GOSF.sg and related digital platforms recorded an estimated 1 million page views. Ten per cent of Singapore’s online population visited the site, 58 per cent of them via a mobile device.

The 65 brands taking part in the festival saw an average 110 per cent increase in traffic to their sites.

“Shopping is a big part of Singaporean culture, with seven out of 10 Singaporean shoppers researching products online before making their purchase in store,” says Google Singapore country director Joanna Flint. “With this insight, we wanted to broaden our program this year to bring together the whole retail community – and to expand beyond deals to celebrate the joy of shopping.”

An innovation is the inclusion of YouTube creators such as Dee Kosh, Eden Ang, Jade Seah, Ministry of Funny, Sandra Riley Tang, TreePotatoes and WhatEverThereWas.

“Singaporeans love YouTube, spending an average of an hour every day consuming content at home and on the go across all devices,” says Flint. “Everything YouTube stars produce is designed to entertain, educate and engage, so we enlisted the help of the Singapore YouTube creator community.”

Key sponsors this year include The Guardian (beauty and wellbeing), Singtel, working with Tree Potatoes (technology and entertainment), Hotels.com and WhatEverThereWas (travel), Lazada and Dee Kosh (lifestyle), Zalora and Sandra Riley Tang (fashion and accessories), Qoo10 and Ministry of Funny (marketplace), and Fair Price (food and beverage). Support sponsors are iMOB Shop, and DBS with Jade Seah.

Collaborating with Google on the event is the DBS Bank, which is offering a competition for its customers supporting the sale.