Double 11 preparation checklist: 50 days out

Fifty days sit between September 22 and November 11. Use them in this order: fund the bonded channel and finish your origin paperwork now, lock price and stock by October 12, submit creative and livestream assets by October 21, and treat October 15 as your real opening day, since the platforms open weeks before the eleventh.

That last point is the one that catches foreign brands. This Double 11 preparation checklist counts back from November 11 because that is the fixed date, but nobody waits for it. Last year the selling was open for a month before the headline day, and the platforms have already started the 2026 cycle.

Most Double 11 countdowns start at 60 days. Sixty days out was September 12, and it has gone. So the first two rungs of the usual ladder are already behind you. Everything below assumes that and says what to do about it.

Here is the whole thing on one screen. A printable version with checkboxes and a line for each owner sits at the Double 11 checklist guide.

The sale does not start on November 11

It hasn’t started on November 11 for years. The 2025 festival was the longest on record, and each big platform ran its own window.

Douyin sold from October 9 to November 11, JD from October 9 to November 14, and Tmall from October 15 to November 14 in the 2025 Double 11. Source: The Paper (澎湃新闻), November 2025. https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_31971814

Read that as an operator and the 50 days collapse. If Tmall opens around October 15 again, you have roughly 20 working days before shoppers can put your product in a cart. By the back half of the countdown you are already trading.

The 2026 cycle is already moving.

Douyin opened merchant registration for its 2026 Double 11 on September 14 and will run the sale from October through November 11 in three phases. Source: Ebrun (亿邦动力), September 2026. https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260919A088XY00

Kuaishou moved a day later and published its calendar with it.

Kuaishou opened merchant recruitment for its 2026 Double 11 on September 15. Source: 21st Century Business Herald (21世纪经济报道), September 2026. https://www.21jingji.com/article/20260916/herald/ae0a3b105798bb224bacac429cb5487c.html

The Kuaishou cycle runs October 7 to November 15, split into pre-sale, opening, category days, closing and an encore window. Source: Ebrun (亿邦动力), September 2026. https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260919A088XY00

Registration is open on both. Kuaishou starts selling on October 7, Douyin sometime in October. Early October is the date that belongs on your wall.

For scale, and for anyone still arguing internally about whether the festival is worth the working capital:

Total online sales across the 2025 Double 11 period reached 1,695 billion RMB, up 14.2% on the year before. Source: Sina Finance (新浪财经), citing Syntun (星图数据), November 2025. https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/bxjj/2025-11-12/doc-infxcura4872746.shtml

Imported brands had a strong festival inside that total.

In the first two weeks of the 2025 Double 11, 927 imported brands on Tmall Global doubled their sales year on year, and nine passed 100 million RMB. Source: E-Commerce Daily (电商报), October 2025. https://www.yilantop.com/news/74594

50 days out: cash and paper, in that order

Two things have no shortcut, and both start today.

The first is money in the bonded channel. Before a unit ships, a bonded warehouse wants a deposit and a prepayment against the tax it will clear on your behalf.

Our Tmall Global calculator carries a 100,000 RMB bonded warehouse deposit and a 300,000 RMB tax prepayment as its working defaults, so 400,000 RMB is committed before the first festival order. Source: TheChinaPath calculator data, September 2026. https://www.thechinapath.com/tools/tmall-global-setup-and-run

You can model your own version in the Tmall Global setup and run calculator. The number moves with category and volume. The sequence never does: the cash clears before the stock does, and the stock clears before the sale does.

The second is documentation, and Tmall Global raised the bar on it last week.

Tmall Global’s upgraded 全球探源计划 asks overseas brands for proof of origin, evidence of authorization for free sale or market approval, and visual evidence of genuine overseas circulation, either an unbroken video walkthrough filmed in a foreign retailer or pharmacy, or sales screenshots from a recognized overseas platform. Claims may not imply disease treatment, may not assert benefits without scientific support, and may not use misleading data or reviews. More than 300 overseas brands have enrolled since May 2026. Source: Global Network (环球网), September 2026. https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260915A091CT00

Getting a retailer in Germany or Korea to film a shelf walk takes a week of asking and a week of waiting. Start it today.

40 to 30 days out: price, then stock

This is the first Double 11 to run under two new rulebooks, and both land on the pricing and returns work you are about to do.

The 网络交易平台规则监督管理办法, joint order 116 of the market regulator and the cyberspace administration, took effect February 1, 2026. Article 27 bars a platform from forcing merchants to carry refund-without-return liability, and article 12 requires seven days’ public notice before a rule change takes effect, or fifteen days where the change affects many users or major interests. Source: State Administration for Market Regulation (国家市场监督管理总局), December 2025. https://www.samr.gov.cn/zw/zfxxgk/fdzdgknr/fgs/art/2026/art_85b474fc5a08494bb60ca6a280b98d7d.html

The 互联网平台价格行为规则, issued by the NDRC, the market regulator and the cyberspace administration as 发改价格规〔2025〕1607号, took effect April 10, 2026. Source: National Development and Reform Commission (国家发展和改革委员会), December 2025. https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/jd/jd/202512/t20251220_1402517.html

The practical read: your discount needs a defensible base price, and you need the records that prove it. That has been the rule since 2022.

Article 19 of the 明码标价和禁止价格欺诈规定, order 56, prohibits selling goods or services through false discounting, false markdowns or false price comparison. It took effect July 1, 2022. Source: State Council Gazette (国务院公报), April 2022. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2022/content_5699926.htm

So set the base price by October 2 and leave it alone. Every day you spend “testing” a price in late October is a day you erode the comparison you are about to publish.

Stock follows price, because the forecast depends on the discount. And the forecast has to survive returns, which is where most Double 11 plans quietly fail.

The overall e-commerce return rate across the 2025 Double 11 period was 61.5%, with apparel sold through livestream running above 80%. Source: Beijing Daily (京报网), carrying CCTV News (央视新闻), January 2026. https://news.bjd.com.cn/2026/01/11/11517038.shtml

That 61.5% is every platform and every category together, so treat it as a planning ceiling rather than your number. Even as a ceiling it rewrites the math. Our Tmall Global calculator prices pick and pack at 4 RMB, last-mile delivery at 11 RMB and return handling at 15 RMB per parcel. A returned order burns all three, so 30 RMB. Ship 1,000 orders at a 61.5% return rate and 615 come back, which spreads 18,450 RMB of dead logistics across the 385 you keep. About 48 RMB a kept order. At the 5% return rate the calculator uses by default, the same drag is under 2 RMB.

Price that in before you set the discount.

21 to 7 days out: the lines people forget

What goes wrong at this stage is almost never strategy.

Livestream sits under its own rulebook now. Order 117, the 直播电商监督管理办法, took effect on the same February 1 date as order 116.

Article 37 requires an operator using an AI-generated presenter to label it under the national rules and to keep telling viewers, throughout the stream, that the figure is machine generated. Article 32 requires the comparison basis of any discount shown in a stream to be displayed clearly. Source: State Council Gazette (国务院公报), December 2025. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/2026/issue_12666/202604/content_7065114.html

If a virtual host is running your overnight slots, your agency has to build that label into the stream itself. A line in a brief won’t do it.

The seeding and creator side of a festival plan is a different job from running the store, and we hand that to TheRedScroll, the group’s China social media agency.

Then the quota. Cross-border retail import has a per-order ceiling, and Double 11 bundles are exactly the mechanic that breaches it.

Cross-border retail import is capped at 5,000 RMB per transaction and 26,000 RMB per shopper per year. Source: Ministry of Commerce (商务部) policy database, 财关税〔2018〕49号, in force January 1, 2019. https://policy.mofcom.gov.cn/claw/clawContent.shtml?id=65769

A gift set that looks clever in a deck can push a basket past 5,000 RMB and strand the order at clearance on the busiest night of the year. Cap the bundle in the builder itself. A customer service script can’t undo a failed clearance.

Last, the reallocation on November 4. Week-one sell-through tells you which SKUs are real. Move stock and budget toward them then, while the warehouse can still act on it. Our campaigns team and the cross-border ecommerce team run that reallocation as one meeting with one owner, because split ownership is how a brand ends up out of stock on its winner and long on its dog.

How to run this Double 11 preparation checklist

Print it. Every line gets a person’s name on it, never a department. Then read the “what breaks” column out loud in the kickoff, because that column is the only part of a checklist anybody remembers in week six.

Every date above was counted back from Wednesday, November 11, 2026, and every platform window here was checked against its source announcement on September 22. Platforms move their own dates. Check the ones that matter to you on the merchant back end before you commit budget against them.

Questions we get asked

When does Double 11 2026 actually start?

November 11 is the headline day, but the selling starts weeks earlier. Douyin has said its 2026 sale runs from October through November 11, and Kuaishou’s cycle opens October 7. In 2025, Tmall sold from October 15 and JD from October 9. Plan for mid-October, and treat any later platform announcement as a bonus.

Is it too late to join Double 11 2026 if we have no China store?

For this year, yes, in practice. Store approval, bonded onboarding and category registration do not compress into 50 days, and the origin documentation Tmall Global now asks for adds weeks on its own. Use this cycle to watch the category, then open in the first quarter so you have a full run at 618.

How much stock should we send to the bonded warehouse?

Forecast the sale, then subtract for returns before you commit. The 2025 festival returned 61.5% of orders across all platforms. Stock you can’t sell by mid-November sits in a bonded warehouse through Chinese New Year and pays storage the whole time, so the cost of over-forecasting is larger than one lost sale.

Do we need a Tmall Partner to run Double 11?

Most foreign brands use one, because the festival is an operations job with a fixed deadline rather than a marketing job. What matters is that one person owns the reallocation decision on November 4. If your agency, your distributor and your head office all have a vote that week, nobody moves.

Send us your SKU list, your landed cost and the date your stock can leave the origin warehouse, and we will tell you which lines on this checklist you can still hit.

Talk to the cross-border ecommerce team