Customers spend billions on China’s ‘Singles Day’

While the consumption frenzy around Singles’ Day draws comparison to Black Friday, the feeling that it is more festival than online shopping comes from the event’s roots.

Chinese shoppers already surpassed last year’s record before midday on Wednesday with retail giant Alibaba taking up 57.1 billion yuan ($8.97bn, £5.92bn) worth of sales.

Alibaba’s Singles Day is promoted on its overseas online mall, Aliexpress, on November 11, 2015.

Kitty Fok, China manager for market research firm IDC said online shopping had become a comfortable channel for most consumers. On the eve of the event, Alibaba hosted a four-hour televised variety show, that included an appearance from Daniel Craig and a video message from Kevin Spacey as his House of Cards character President Frank Underwood, wishing everyone a very “happy Singles’ Day”. The giant online “24-hour orgy of spending” generated .6 billion in e-commerce sales within the first 12 minutes of #SinglesDay, culminating in billion earned by the first hour. This means that by the time Alibaba reached last year’s total, there was almost 10 hours of shopping left in the sales event. GDP, the Gross Domestic Product, represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced in the country.

“If I were allowed to shop in your ‘Singles Day, ‘ I wonder how cheap I could get for a new burner phone, for example, because one burner is never really enough, is it?”

For more on this year’s double 11 shopping spree, CRI’s Wang Mengzhen earlier spoke with Professor Liu Baocheng, from the University of global Business and Economics. “Over the course of the 24-hour marathon, consumers will have a new surprise every hour that has been especially tailored for mobile users”.

Alibaba provides live updates about the 11.11 Sales event on Alizila.

“At each 11.11, Alibaba’s infrastructure is put to the test and our technological capabilities are taken to the next level”, Zhang continued.

Last year, the company had handled a peak volume of 80,000 orders per second, and this was expected to rise to 120,000 orders per second in 2015. We have plans for the unexpected. “It will be a proud achievement for us”.