Shein swapped Black Friday for Singles Day overnight in five markets

Shein changed its mind about November in a single night. On the morning of 1 November its storefronts in Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden carried a Black Friday sale on fashion. By the next morning all five had dropped Black Friday and were running Singles Day instead.

Three of those five markets, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, are places where our news radar linked no retailer at all to Singles Day in 2024 or 2025. In those markets the 11.11 shopping day has reached the homepage before it has reached the press.

One night, five markets

The switch was clean. On 1 November Shein's homepage in each of the five markets showed a Black Friday label. On 2 November none did, and each showed a Singles Day label instead. The readings of 3 November were the same.

Market	1 November	2 and 3 November
Belgium	Black Friday sale on fashion	Singles Day clearance on fashion
Netherlands	Black Friday sale on fashion	Singles Day clearance on fashion
Ireland	Black Friday sale on fashion	Singles Day sale on fashion
Portugal	Black Friday sale on fashion	Singles Day sale on fashion
Sweden	Black Friday sale on fashion	Singles Day sale on fashion

One detail stands out. In Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands a flat 14% off fashion that ran next to the Black Friday banner on 1 November had gone by 2 November.

Shein's storefronts in Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom carried no event label on any of the three days. Germany, for example, showed up to 65% off fashion throughout, with no named occasion attached.

Shein did not add Singles Day to Black Friday; it replaced it, 25 days before Black Friday and 9 days before 11.11.

From one retailer to six

Before Shein moved, Singles Day was a one-retailer story on European homepages. Lidl in Germany has carried a Singles Day label every day since 31 October, alongside its Black Friday label. On 1 November it was the only one.

On 2 November the count went from one retailer to six, in six markets. Black Friday went the other way, from 13 retailers to 8, because Shein left it in five markets. By 3 November Black Friday was back up to 10 retailers, as IBS in Italy and CDON in Sweden added it, while Singles Day held at six.

For a few days in early November, then, Singles Day and Black Friday are close to level on the homepages we read. That has not been how the season has looked in the press.

Where has Singles Day been in the news?

Our news radar keeps a history of how many retailers each market's press linked to each shopping event. For Singles Day, that history draws a clear map.

Germany and Spain are where 11.11 has a press life. In Germany, 7 retailers were named in Singles Day coverage in 2025, from Lidl and MediaMarkt to Shein and Temu, up from 6 in 2024. Spain had 4 retailers but the most noise: 37 mentions in 2025, nearly double the 19 of 2024, with the first story on 29 September, six weeks before the day.

Portugal is a special case. For the 2024 edition, the earliest Singles Day story in any market was about Shein Portugal, on 22 October 2024, and Shein was named again in Portuguese coverage in 2025.

Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden sit at the other end. Across both years, no retailer in any of the three was named in Singles Day news. Ireland had a single retailer each year, Amazon.

So three of Shein's five Singles Day markets are places where the event had no press footprint at all, and a fourth is in a market where only Amazon had one.

That does not mean Shein is new to 11.11 there. An archived copy of the storefront Shein serves to Belgium and Ireland, saved by the Wayback Machine on 9 November 2025, shows an 11.11 brand-markdown promotion and no Black Friday wording. The event was on the homepage last year too. The press simply did not write about it.

The press is catching up this year

Coverage is rising, from a low base. Our radar counted 25 Singles Day news stories in the seven days to 3 November, against 5 at the same point a year earlier. Italy had 11 and France 7. Belgium had 3 and Sweden 1, two markets that had no Singles Day story tied to a retailer in either of the past two years.

The stories are mostly about one company. AliExpress was named in 17 of them, far ahead of Amazon, Boulanger, PayPal and Shein with 2 each. Much of that coverage reads like coupon guides: lists of codes and the hours at which payment discounts open.

AliExpress is in the news, Shein is on the homepage

That split is the real finding. The retailer the press writes about most is not the one turning Singles Day into a homepage label.

On AliExpress's Spanish storefront, in the market where Singles Day coverage started earliest last year, we recorded voucher codes and up to 80% off on 1, 2 and 3 November, but no promotion that named Singles Day. Shein, named in 2 stories in the same week, put the label on its homepages in five markets overnight.

For retailers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, that matters more than the press count suggests. A shopper in Brussels or Stockholm who has never read a Singles Day article may still meet the event on 11 November, because the homepage of a large fashion marketplace told them about it nine days earlier.

What to watch

• 11 November, Singles Day: whether Shein's other five storefronts take up the label, and whether any retailer in Belgium, the Netherlands or Sweden other than Shein follows.
• 12 November onwards: when Shein's homepages in the five markets return to Black Friday, and whether the Singles Day labels turn into stated discounts.
• Black Week, which our calendar estimates from 20 November: whether Lidl in Germany keeps running both labels side by side until Singles Day has passed.

How we measured this

We read retailer homepages and deal pages each morning and record each live promotion with the event it names; this piece uses the readings of 31 October to 3 November 2026. A retailer counts as showing a label when at least one live promotion on its homepage or deal page names that event. News figures come from our news radar: the seven-day count of Singles Day stories on 3 November, and the retailers linked to Singles Day coverage in each market for the 2024 and 2025 editions.