China’s Singles Day sales dropped 4.7% in the first half of the last day, according to a research firm.

A research firm said that sales for the first half of the last day went down by 4.7% for Alibaba Group Holding and other Chinese e-commerce companies that held Singles Day shopping events together.

Chinese consulting firm Syntun said it thought the total for the 12-hour time period would be 223 billion yuan, or about $31 billion. It didn’t break down the numbers for each e-commerce company.

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Even though it’s called “Singles Day,” the shopping festival has become a multi-week event. It’s a key indicator of how much Chinese people want to shop.

Consumer sentiment is low, though, because of China’s strict COVID restrictions and a sharply slowing economy. This year’s sales are likely to be low because of this. Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) is also not holding its usual gala, and analysts expect the e-commerce giant’s sales to stay flat or grow only slightly.

Alibaba stopped updating the gross merchandise value across all of its platforms as often as it used to two years ago.

That’s part of an effort to keep people from getting too excited about the event as Chinese President Xi Jinping puts more and more emphasis on “common prosperity.” This is an attempt to close the growing wealth gap and deter people from doing things that the Communist Party considers excessive.

Alibaba is still likely to release a final number on Friday, when the event ends.

Citi analysts said this week that they were making a conservative estimate that Alibaba’s gross merchandise value (GMV) for the event would be between 545 billion and 560 billion yuan ($75 and 77 billion), an increase of 0.9% to 3.6%.

But they thought that the Singles Day event of competitor JD (NASDAQ:JD).Com Inc. would do a little better because it has a lot of consumer electronics and home appliances, which are likely to stay popular.

Related: Oil prices go down as hopes for a rise in demand from China start to fade.

Alibaba and JD.com did not answer questions about the Syntun data when they were asked.