Alibaba had plenty of signage and placards around its company headquarters in Hangzhou, China, related to Singles’ Day.
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba crushed their own sales record for online sales yesterday, netting more than $14 billion on Singles Day (11/11). Online retailer Flipkart’s six-day festival season Big Billion sale prompted other e-tailers to join the party too. By comparison, the US’s Cyber Monday reportedly made US$1.4 billion in total sales.
Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief executive, said during the event, “This year, Alibaba Group has transformed 11.11 into an unprecedented mobile shopping experience. Chinese consumers associate quality and prestige with American and European brands, and both have very solid presence on 11/11 in response to strong consumer demand”.
Alipay, Alibaba’s online payments platform, processed 710 million transactions. Last year, the company sold $9.3 billion worth of goods over 24 hour period.
The shopping event was first marketed as an “anti-Valentine’s Day”, featuring hefty discounts to lure singletons and price-sensitive buyers. Alibaba, which operates China’s largest consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, has played a leading role in the Singles’ Day shopping craze but faces increasing competition this year, including from its rival JD.com, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Of the total value of transactions, 68 percent was through orders from mobile devices. E-commerce transactors got busy on the annual Singles Day which fell on Wednesday. JD recorded more than 20 million orders as of 5 p.m. China time, according to reports.
For the first time in the event’s seven-year history, Alibaba rang in Singles’ Day this year with a gala ceremony at the Beijing Water Cube, the aquatics center of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Alibaba set out to make Singles Day a worldwide selling event, and it appears to have succeeded.
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“With a sales holiday like this, because there is a lot of impulse purchasing and a lot of gifting, there is no guarantee that people are going to end up liking the product”, said China Market Research’s Ben Cavender.
