Alibaba smashed all sales record on their annual 11/11 Singles Day extravaganza shifting RMB 120.7 billion ($17.79 billion) in gross merchandise volume in just 24 hours. Thats up around a third on last year’s Singles Day.
Other records smashed were RMB 98.97 billion ($14.6 billion) in GMV generated on mobile devices and 657 million delivery orders, compared with $9.8 billion and 467 million, respectively, in 2015. 1.04 billion payment transactions were processed compared with 710 million last year.
11.11 isn’t a purely Chinese affair. According to Alibaba, 235 countries and regions completed cross-border transactions during the festival, with thousands of international brands participating. Adidas, Apple, Nike, Pampers, Phillips, Siemens and Uniqlo were all among the most popular in their respective product categories.
Alibaba this year made a significant push outside the realm of pure sales to include increasing levels of interactivity among its platforms, the merchants and consumers shopping at home. Chief among those was a new virtual reality shopping experience, Buy+, in which users could shop and purchase goods in a VR environment. They also launched an augmented-reality game, “Finding the Carnival Cat,” a Pokemon Go-style game that allowed players to chase Tmall’s cat mascot into real-world retailers and restaurants such as Intime shopping malls, Starbucks and KFC.
One Response
Do these numbers sound legit? Amazon apparently did 86 items a second in the UK on Black Friday, Alibaba did 175,000? That’s such a huge discrepancy, it doesn’t sound possible. Insane figures if it’s all true.