E-commerce giant Alibaba said on Thursday (Nov 12) that Chinese and global consumers spent more than 91.2 billion yuan (S$20.3 billion, US$14 billion) in the world’s biggest online shopping day, as it sought to soothe worries over China’s slowing economy.
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Past year during Singles Day (the 11th of November, or 11/11), the company managed to rake in a whopping $1 billion in sales within 17 minutes.
Singles Day has become a Chinese tradition since students at Nanjing University in the 1990s chose the date as an antidote to Valentine’s Day, so single people could have a day to buy things for themselves.
Last year, Alibaba hosted $9.3bn worth of transactions on its online stores, after consumers spent $2bn in the first hour alone.
Alibaba CEO Jack Ma hopes to spread China’s online shopping fever to the rest of the world.
Huge demand from China caused a shortage of premium organic baby milk formula in Australia.
This year’s Singles Day comes at a critical juncture for the company. And Alibaba even hired James Bond star, Daniel Craig, to help launch proceedings and earn even more coverage for its range of offers. According to Tech Crunch, total U.S. Thanksgiving shopping topped $1 billion and Black Friday topped $1.5 billion, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 32 percent and 26 percent, respectively. Just ask Alibaba, which reported sales for the day reached $14.3 billion, a 60 percent increase over the same day in 2014. And at least 27,000 merchants from across the globe participated. JD also surpassed total orders for the five previous Singles’ Day events combined. The second-ranking JD.com, though much smaller in volume, said 32 million orders were placed on Thursday, up 130 percent from past year.
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The shopping day featured more than six million products from 30,000 brands and mobile users had a new surprise every hour, Alibaba said.
