Mobile sales have driven this strong performance, 73.9% of the purchases made in the first hour came from mobile devices. This year, industry watchers are keeping a close eye on the proceedings to see if China’s sluggish growth impacts the consumer spendathon.
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Alibaba said $1 billion was spent within the first eight minutes after midnight on Wednesday, and $3.9 billion in the first hour.
In contrast, sales on Cyber Monday, which will be the largest internet shopping day in America, hit $1.35bn, according to data analytics company ComScore.
In 2009, Alibaba started promoting the day as an opportunity for single people to buy discounted goods online to treat themselves.
Cainiao Logistics, the logistics affiliate of Alibaba Group, received 310 million delivery orders as of 2 p.m. China time, exceeding the 278 million orders generated during the entire day of November 11, 2014.
GMV is the total amount settled through mobile wallet Alipay across domestic and global platforms.
November 11 will mark the 7th annual Singles Day, a shopping celebration organized by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Instead you might be more familiar with companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and etc. However over in Asia, especially China, Alibaba is a big deal.
This year’s Singles Day sale is critical for the Chinese company as it was under huge pressure from investors after its stock price declined by about 40% in the 12 months since its $21.8bn listing in NY last year. JD said it had surpassed its sales previous year but didn’t give specifics.
Following the success of Singles Day, Amazon created its own manufactured shopping holiday in July this year called Prime Day. He said the target is to help United States-based enterprises in becoming e-commerce firms like Amazon (AMZN) with the help of Alibaba services including cloud computing, its logistics and payments operation.
For more on this year’s double 11 shopping spree, CRI’s Wang Mengzhen earlier spoke with Professor Liu Baocheng, from the University of worldwide Business and Economics.
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The event has received vocal support from the government at a time when China’s economic expansion is slowing and Beijing is trying to transform the growth model into a more sustainable one driven by consumption.
