As International Women's Day arrived on March 8, department stores in Shanghai launched a series of online shopping activities in a new way which included cloud shopping and cloud shows.

As Shanghai had seen a remission of the coronavirus disease, the business and trade industries in the city resumed work and production in an orderly manner. By March 5, more than 95 percent of Shanghai's 277 shopping centers and 80 department stores had reopened, according to data from the Shanghai Association of Shopping Centers and the Shanghai Department Store Industry Association. Among the 92 shopping centers sampled, nearly 18,000 merchants, or 76.8 percent of the total, have returned to business.

All the city's main shopping centers, department stores offer livestream broadcasts, aiming to accelerate sales of cosmetics. A shopping center belonging to Bailian Group successfully launched the March 8 beauty makeup festival, and from 1 pm to 4:30 pm on March 7, an online beauty makeup broadcast room was opened for cosmetics lovers with 10 famous brands taking turns to make their debuts online. During the livestream broadcast, bonus points and other extra discounts were popular among the online buyers.

A person in charge of Huijin Department Store said that during the war against COVID-19, the store quickly built five company-level livestream broadcast groups and more than 300 counter brand WeChat groups in a short period of time.

The department store carried out super strong online promotion for the March 8 festival, gathering tens of thousands of fans from more than 300 WeChat groups. On March 6 only, the online sales volume reached more than 900,000 yuan ($12,984), and the number of items sold exceeded 1,000. The sales volume on March 7 exceeded 1.2 million yuan, which was an increase of 33 percent over the previous day.

Packages for delivery for the March 8 beauty makeup festival in Shanghai are ready to go to their customers. [Photo/WeChat account: scofcom]