The 11th of the 11th is a strange date. Four 1’s on one day.
In China they celebrate Singles Day, the counterpart of Valentines Day. The four 1’s look like 4 ‘bare sticks’ what stands for single guys.On this day these singles were invited to buy something nice for themselves.
Nowadays, the 11th of the 11th is the biggest online shopping event in China, lasting for just 24 hours.
Alibaba breaks its own records
In 2009 Tmall.com, one of the Alibaba group companies started this sales day. China didn’t know any sales day (like black Friday in the USA) yet. So this opportunity to the Chinese people was unique.
In 2009 ‘only’ 27 companies joined this event. In 2015, 27 thousand companies joined this event. I think they should give the (wo)man who had the initial idea a statue!
Breaking down into numbers
Alibaba said that it sold for over 57.1 billion yuan or 9 billion dollars in just the first 12 hours. Let’s see how much that is per second…
9,000,000,000 in 12 hours =
750,000 per hour =
125,000 per minute =
208,333 USD per second…
Wow! Alibaba ended with 91.2 billion yuan or 14.5 billion USD.
Alibaba made this with all its stores like: AliExpress (English consumer), AliBaba (English B2B), Taobao (for the Chinese) and Tmall.com. It calculated to sell 120,000 parcels per minute. To get it all shippied in time Alibaba used 1.7 million couriers, 400,000 truck an 200 airplanes.
I bet no other store did so many sales ever in such a short time…
Wel… Maybe… The Alibaba biggest competitor JD.com (I haven’t mentioned this store because it is all Chinese) didn’t mention amounts but said it topped the number of orders of 2014 in the first 12 hours.
If you don’t buy, you are a fool
The marketing campaign for this day was running for weeks. Almost everybody in China was thinking or working towards this day. ‘If you wouldn’t go for shopping on this day, you are a fool’
A message from the president of the United States of America. Not Obama, but the Kevin Spacey as House of Cards actor Frank Underwood. Sitting behind his presidential desk. Acting like he is sorry he cannot buy on Singles Day.
A must watch (especially if you are a House of Cards fan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-rk07Y35Pw
Singles day is over, no more sale??
Although this event is merely for the Chinese people. Many stores joined this day, stores like AliExpress (of course, as part of the Alibaba group). We must wait for other events, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday at the end of this months. Don’t forget to put November 27th in your calendar if you are planning to buy a new phone or other stuff in China soon!
And…
Did you buy something yesterday in China? What was it? How much discount did you get? Let us know in the comment box below!
See you!
Bastiaan,
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6 replies to "Chinese web stores break sales records on Singles Day"
I bought an external solar power bank, a small wi-fi adapter and some shaving razor blades 😀
However… I deeply doubt the quality of that battery… It advertises it as 20000mah but in the picture advertisement it says 10000mah and a lot of customers complain that it’s only 3000-5000mah in reality. It’s also wrong that so many ads of the same product have the same mistakes in them… It’s like they don’y give a shit…So that’s kind of the risk of not knowing what you’re going to get… But I was just too damn curious to see for myself. :))
I think most Chinese cannot speak or translate English correctly. There are always many mistakes in their translations unless they got someone native doing it. But that’s more expensive and often not worthy compared to the price.
It has nothing to do with their English… It is a freaking number – it’s a big number in a big commercial picture – it says 10000mah next to the picture of the product, while their text description says 20000mah and a picture of the “real” product. But wait! there’s more contradiction: another picture shows another “real” image of the product, that on the back cover has written 20000mah but right beneath it as text that is part of the picture it says with big writing 10000mah. WTF? 😐 And when you read some user’s comments they say that from their usage that only contains 5000mah at most. I was shocked and intrigued! So I said YOLO, it’s a nice price even for a 5000mah battery, BUT I really don’t appreciate them lying and confusing people like that. It’s a total random advert… – and that’s not the only one I’ve seen of it’s kind…
It’s always a trade off. YOLO!
Hi Bastiaan.
Busy day yesterday bought 31 products with discount 25-89% (AliExpress)
It was a pleasure to do all these trades, am looking forward to receiving all of my product soon.
Looking forward to 11.11 next year. 🙂
Guido.
That’s the spirit 😉 Just another 366 days…