Shopping Festivals

🇮🇳How does India mark Shopping Festivals?Big Billion Days

India's festive sales have no official date at all: Big Billion Days and the Great Indian Festival are the platforms' own events, timed to the buying season before Diwali and announced afresh each year, usually somewhere between late September and early October. What makes India distinctive is not the discount but the interface — it is the only one of the seven markets with a rulebook written for the screen rather than the price tag. The Central Consumer Protection Authority issued the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns on 30 November 2023, naming thirteen specified dark patterns in the e-commerce sector; the official summaries give drip pricing, disguised advertisements and false urgency among them. They sit under the Consumer Protection Act 2019, alongside the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020. On 28 May 2025 a stakeholder meeting in New Delhi chaired by the Union Minister brought in Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato among others and directed them to self-audit and remove dark patterns. Elsewhere the state asks whether the discount is real; India also asks whether the countdown clock, the item that added itself to the basket, and the fee that appears at the last step are real.

static.pib.gov.in ↗static.pib.gov.in ↗

🇨🇳How does China mark Shopping Festivals?双十一

Double Eleven falls on 11 November. Retailers invented it in 2009; the regulator now writes to them about it every year. The State Administration for Market Regulation sends the major platforms a compliance notice on concentrated online promotions for Double Eleven; the one published on 10 November 2025 runs to six headings: enforcing the platform's own responsibilities; regulating promotional conduct, where forced exclusivity between platforms and price discrimination against loyal customers are both named and forbidden; regulating pricing conduct, where raising a price before discounting it and making false comparisons are forbidden; regulating livestream selling; tightening advertising review; and resolving consumer disputes, including seven-day no-reason returns. The binding instrument behind the notice is the Interim Provisions on Regulating Promotional Conduct, SAMR Order No. 32, promulgated on 29 October 2020 and in force from 1 December 2020. Article 21 requires a discount to state the price it is measured from; where it does not, the reference is fixed by law as the lowest transaction price the same seller charged at the same place during the seven days before the promotion, or the last transaction price if there were no sales in those seven days. Returns come from Article 25 of the Consumer Rights Protection Law and the Interim Measures on Seven-Day No-Reason Returns for Online Purchases: seven days from receipt, with only four exceptions — made to order, perishable, downloaded or unsealed digital goods, and delivered newspapers and periodicals. Of the seven markets, only China puts a number of days into the definition of a discount.

samr.gov.cn ↗gov.cn ↗

🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Shopping Festivals?雙十一

Taiwan's Double Eleven falls on 11 November, alongside the department-store anniversary sales that stretch from September into November and an imported Black Friday. None of the three has any legal standing; two statutes carry them. The first is Article 21 of the Fair Trade Act, which forbids a business from making false or misleading representations about the price of goods and is enforced by the Fair Trade Commission — but it fixes no look-back period for a claimed original price, so whether a discount advertisement is false is decided case by case. The second is Article 19 of the Consumer Protection Act, and it is the harder of the two: a consumer in a distance transaction may rescind within seven days of receiving the goods, by returning them or by written notice, without giving any reason and without bearing any cost or consideration whatsoever. If the trader failed to supply the rescission information on delivery, the seven days run from the day after it is supplied, though the right dies four months after receipt — and any agreement contrary to the article is void. That last clause is the difference from Japan: in Taiwan a seller cannot write its own return policy over the top of those seven days.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗law.moj.gov.tw ↗

🇯🇵How does Japan mark Shopping Festivals?ブラックフライデー

Japan's Black Friday was imported by the retail trade. It has no legal standing and no official date: each chain announces its own window in late November, and the windows differ in length. Price claims fall under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. The guidance titled "Views on unfair price representations under the Act" was issued by the Fair Trade Commission on 30 June 2000, revised on 5 December 2002 and 4 January 2006, and taken over by the Consumer Affairs Agency on 1 April 2016. It allows a past price to serve as the comparison price only where the same item was sold at that price "over a substantial recent period" — a period that need not be continuous, since intermittent sales are assessed as a whole, and where "sold" means offered in the ordinary course of business, with no requirement that anyone actually bought it. On 25 December 2020 the Consumer Affairs Agency added an enforcement policy for the other form: the "cheap now, back up to X next week" comparison against a future price. Returns work quite differently here. Mail order has no cooling-off period; under Article 15-3 of the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions a buyer may withdraw within eight days of delivery, but only where the seller displayed no return policy of its own — where it did, the seller's terms govern, and return postage falls on the consumer. The law's move is instead to make the return terms an item that advertising may not omit, and for internet orders it must appear again on the final confirmation screen. Eight days in Japan is a default the seller may contract out of.

caa.go.jp ↗caa.go.jp ↗

🇧🇷How does Brazil mark Shopping Festivals?Black Friday

Brazil's Black Friday falls on the last Friday in November: 27 November 2026, 26 November 2027, 24 November 2028. It is not a holiday of any kind and has no statute of its own; everything rests on the Consumer Defence Code, Law 8.078 of 1990. Article 37 forbids misleading advertising. Article 49 gives anyone who bought away from the premises — online or by telephone — seven days, counted from signing the contract or from receiving the goods, to withdraw with no reason required. Article 26 keeps the statutory warranty alive on discounted goods: thirty days for non-durables, ninety for durables. Enforcement belongs to the state and federal-district consumer bodies. In October 2023 the Federal District's Consumer Defence Institute, part of the Justice and Citizenship Secretariat, announced it would step up inspection of the main shopping centres and the largest e-commerce sites, checking whether advertised offers were honoured, whether advertising was misleading, and whether customer service existed; complaints go to ten walk-in posts or to 151@procon.df.gov.br. Its director-general, Marcelo Nascimento, told shoppers to track prices beforehand and keep screenshots of the offers. The same body's 2025 guidance records how the shape has changed: promotions now run across the whole of November and well beyond retail — courses, mentoring, digital products — and are advertised by private individuals and informal traders too. Raising a price the day before in order to cut it on the day is named outright as misleading advertising, and is punishable.

procon.df.gov.br ↗procon.df.gov.br ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Shopping Festivals? · Black Friday

There is no such day as Black Friday in United States federal law. The day with legal standing is the one before it: Thanksgiving Day, listed among the federal holidays at 5 U.S.C. 6103. The Office of Personnel Management's schedules put it on Thursday 26 November 2026, Thursday 25 November 2027 and Thursday 23 November 2028; the Friday that follows is an ordinary working day for federal employees. What does reach the discounts is the Federal Trade Commission's Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, 16 CFR Part 233, published on 8 November 1967 and barely touched since. Section 233.1 says a former price may be used for comparison only if it was "the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time"; where "an artificial, inflated price was established for the purpose of enabling the subsequent offer of a large reduction", the bargain is a false one. Note the word: these are *guides*, interpretations of section 5 of the FTC Act, and they name no look-back period at all. The Commission's newer fee rule, 16 CFR Part 464, in force since 2025, does require the total price up front — but its definition of a covered good or service reaches only live-event tickets and short-term lodging. Retail goods sit outside it.

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opm.gov ↗ecfr.gov ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Shopping Festivals? · Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving: 30 November 2026, 29 November 2027, 27 November 2028. It is not a federal holiday either, and no federal regulation has ever been written for it — the name began as a trade-association marketing coinage. Even the statistics are absent: the Census Bureau publishes retail e-commerce quarterly and has never issued a single-day figure, so every record-breaking Cyber Monday number in the press is a private estimate rather than an official measurement. Where the government does appear on that day, it appears as law enforcement. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issues a holiday shopping alert each year before Thanksgiving; the one dated 15 November 2023 (I-111523-PSA) reported that in the 2022 holiday season alone almost 12,000 victims filed non-payment or non-delivery complaints, with losses of more than $73 million.

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census.gov ↗ic3.gov ↗

🇮🇩How does Indonesia mark Shopping Festivals?Harbolnas

Harbolnas — Hari Belanja Online Nasional, the national online shopping day — falls on 12 December, named for the digits 12.12. E-commerce platforms started it in 2012; the Ministry of Trade now lends its name and takes part, which makes this the one shopping festival among the seven that a national government directly endorses. The ministry wraps it in a "Beli Lokal 12.12" campaign built around micro, small and medium enterprises. Harbolnas 2023 ran from 10 to 12 December, and the ministry publicly set a transaction target of 25 trillion rupiah. On 12 December 2024 the Trade Minister, Budi Santoso, went to Shopee's Jakarta office and sold small-business products on livestream himself, while the campaign ran simultaneously across Indonesian e-commerce platforms. The legal frame is Government Regulation No. 80 of 2019 on Trade Through Electronic Systems. The government's motive here runs opposite to everywhere else on this page: it turns up not to police the discounts but to push sales of domestic products and online exports.

kemendag.go.id ↗kemendag.go.id ↗