Journalists film a giant screen showing a total sales transacted of e-commerce giant Alibaba, on the “Singles’ Day” global online shopping festival held at National Aquatic Center, also known as the “Water Cube” in Beijing, China, Wednesday, November 11, 2015.
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This year, many luxury retailers, including Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Off 5th, and Neiman Marcus, have partnered with Dealmoon.com to offer Singles’ Day deals to consumers.
The 57 billion yuan (S$12.7 billion) worth of goods shifted last year accounted for 2.3 per cent of the full-year total.
Daniel Zhang Alibaba’s chief executive told the media, “the whole world will witness the power of Chinese consumption”.
The number of buyers using mobile devices – a key priority for Alibaba – reached 95 million through Taobao and Tmall, it said, without giving a figure for total buyers.
The distribution operation behind such an event is nearly mind-boggling. What we’re focused on is internationalizing our business in the sense that we now have a lot more sellers on our platform that are importing products from outside China into China, given our access to 380 million consumers.
Alibaba CEO Jack Ma had earlier expressed desire to expand China’s online shopping fever to the rest of the world.
The event started as an anti-Valentine’s Day joke, but now “Singles’ Day” far surpasses the USA online sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
And now it appears that it has coincided with a 60pc increase in revenues over Singles Day in 2014 through Alibaba’s payments service Alipay, and a 158pc increase overall.
For Australian retailers, “Singles” Day’ showcases just how powerful china is as a market. For example, Forever 21 one-day sales increased by 650% compared to Singles Day 2014.
Chinese consumers bought 69% of the total sales on mobile, a sharp rise from 42.6% a year ago.
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Alibaba Group also moved its count-down program from its headquarters in Hangzhou to Beijing to mark the day with a glitzy variety show. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) has also been looking to extend its market brand to other countries most notably in the U.S. where it is going to open a third office in the city of NY.
