• Yahoo is one of the participants of Taiwan's Singles' Day.

Yahoo is one of the participants of Taiwan's Singles' Day. (Photo : Reuters)

Taiwan recently held its own version of "Singles' Day," an annual online shopping spectacle in China that started in the 1990s.

E-commerce sites such as Yahoo, GOMAJI and Rakuten participated in the said event where they offered online goods and products at a discounted price.

For the next 10 days after Alibaba's Singles' Day, Yahoo is offering discounts of up to 50 percent. On the other hand, the Japan-based Rakuten offered over 10,000 discounted items from around 400 vendors.

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Meanwhile, GOMAJI gave coupons amounting to $244,000. Taiwan-based ET Mall also joined the occasion and promoted products with up to 11 percent discount.

In a press release, Rakuten shared that the visits to its website increased by 50 percent compared with their data from the previous day. Sales for products like smartphones and digital cameras also doubled.

This year's Taiwanese Singles' Day was also not a first for Yahoo. Last year, it has launched a similar campaign that gave the firm a fourfold increase in its total sales.

With such event and with the firms' hyped efforts to intensify their games, the Taiwanese government has also initiated measures that can help the local market cope with the surge.

Late last month, Taiwan customs established a special squad tasked to accommodate the increasing number of imported goods. Data from the Taipei office of Chinese mainland e-commerce firm Taobao.com showed that it received around 1.5 million applications for customs clearance of small imported items.

Nonetheless, some Taiwanese consumers are still reluctant to purchase from mainland e-commerce shopping sites. A survey held by the Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute revealed that 37 percent of its 313 respondents are interested but cautious about doing transactions via mainland platforms.