The Cyber weekend numbers are in and it’s becoming increasingly obvious what a power house China’s Alibaba is. Comparing US vs Alibaba Holiday sales for 2018, Alibaba’s Single’s Day beat all four US Cyber weekend sales combined.
US vs Alibaba Holiday Sales numbers
Adobe tracked sales in the US from Thanksgiving Day ($3.35 billion), Black Friday ($6.2 billion), Small Business Saturday ($3.02 billion), and Cyber Monday ($7.9 billion). Together the US holiday sales over the four key selling days totalled $20.47 billion.
In comparison, Alibaba sold $30.8 billion in 24 hours on Single’s Day on the 11th of November.
We don’t know total Chinese sales on Single’s Day, but JD.com also broke the US holiday sales total with sales of $23 billion but this was spread over 11 days from the 1st to the 11th of November.
China is dwarfing US ecommerce but is still a difficult country to target for western retailers. Chinese consumers expect a very different experience with customer service available through social media and selling through video streaming. Realistically for a Western retailer to be successful in China they’ll need a team on the ground which will generally mean joining forces with a Chinese partner.
Chinese ecommerce is expected to reach ecommerce $1.8tn in 2022 according to Forrester, which will be roughly double the size of ecommerce in the US. With this in mind it’s no surprise that Chinese holiday sales are already larger than the US and this is a trend that we can only expect to accelerate over the course of the next few years.
