This year’s 818 Shopping Festival run by Suning.com closed Friday with sales up 155 per cent over last year.

The 818 Shopping Festival is an annual online-to-offline sales event featuring discounts and promotional campaigns across the group’s domestic and international retail channels.

This, the sixth 25-day long event, merged online to offline strategies with new smart retail concepts and led to Suning.com’s retail app ranking as China’s most downloaded for nine consecutive days.

Suning says active user numbers increased 97 per cent over last year.

“Every year, we aim to surpass all previous years, and this year we have achieved a quantum leap,” said Suning Holdings Group chairman Zhang Jindong.

The 818 Shopping Festival involved 6753 Suning-owned brick-and-mortar stores, including their own retail stores, shopping plazas, hotels, sports stores, cinemas, SuFresh supermarkets, and CVS. More than 30,000 brand suppliers and 35,000 tenants participated.

Some 1000 Suning Retail Cloud Stores empowered rural consumers, with 267 per cent month-on-month growth during the event.

The festival peaked on August 18, when 1356 Suning CVS’s “last kilometer” retail services served more than 20 million customers with sales up 662 per cent.

More than 150 million people watched Suning’s 818 Spree-topia event live broadcast online.

Lipstick remained one of the top-selling overseas beauty products with sales up 365 per cent year-on-year during Chinese Valentine’s Day.

To fulfil the vast number of orders during the 25-day sales event, Suning used drones and self-driving vehicles alongside more traditional delivery formats.