Alibaba Prepares a Grand Retail Experiment for This Singles’ Day

Jack Ma beat Jeff Bezos into grocery stores. Now China’s richest man is again showing his rival the way by targeting 6 million mom-and-pop shops, the biggest test yet of a vision to reinvent physical retail.
Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is prepping for Singles’ Day -- an annual Nov. 11 online shopping fiesta dwarfing Black Friday and Cyber Monday that Citigroup Inc. estimates could generate a record 158 billion yuan ($24 billion) of sales. This year comes with a twist: the e-commerce titan has enlisted 10 percent of China’s convenience stores, about 600,000 outlets, to hawk goods and get billions of parcels shipped to customers nationwide.
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