Alibaba‘s Singles’ Day records have been smashed yet again with a massive $25.3 billion of merchandise being sold today. That’s 39% above the 2016 Singles’ Day sales total of $17.8 billion which was eclipsed after just 13 hours and nine minutes into the shopping extravaganza.
This loneliest of dates (one-one-one-one), which meant to resemble four solitary sticks, is when China celebrates its Singles’ Day. What started as students Anti-Valentine’s celebration back in the 1990s is now a nationwide phenomena of buying and exchanging gifts.
2017 Singles’ Day records in numbers
Total GMV of $25.3 billion was generated by 812 million 11.11 delivery orders versus 657 million last year, up 23%.
The percentage of GMV generated by mobile users was 90% – a clear sign that Alibaba has realized the goal it set several years ago to migrate consumers to the platform they hold in their hand.
Alibaba Cloud processed 325,000 orders per second at peak. Alipay processed 1.5 billion payment transactions in total, up 41% from 2016, and processed 256,000 transactions per second at peak.
Singles’ Day vs Black Friday
39% Growth really is staggering, global ecommerce grew 24.6% in 2016 so Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales are far outpacing any metric you care to name.
Singles’s Day far out ranks the entire Black Friday Weekend in terms of sales, last year Single’s Day sales were triple the combined total from Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With Alibaba setting the benchmark for growth at 39% in just a couple of weeks time we’ll know if the western world is keeping pace with China or if it’s falling even further behind.
Shipping to China with Webinterpret
Over 140,000 brands, 60,000 of which were international, took part in Tmall’s shopping extravaganza, offering 15 million product listings to consumers.
Recognising China’s growing ecommerce potential and to celebrate this year’s Singles’ Day, WebInterpret has introduced China as a new shipping destination within its Parcel Forwarding service for online store merchants. With bulk purchasing they say that they can lower shipping cost, on average by 30%, which in turns helps retailers to grow their GMV.
The Parcel Forwarding service is not only cheaper in acquisition and reliable according to Webinterpret, it demands less effort from sellers too. Merchants simply send their packages to a domestic shipping hub and the program handles international logistics and delivery for them.
2 Responses
Ivanka Trump brands 256,000 transactions per second sold out.
I thought singles day was known as St Skeletors Day ( February the 15th ) for anyone interested. XD