November 11th became to be known as “singles’ day” in China about a decade ago. It was a tongue-in-cheek celebration of all the single people in the country. Online retail giant Alibaba turned this into an online shopping event back in 2009 and the rest is history. The sheer volume of sales that it generates will blow your mind. Alibaba’s Singles’ Day 2017 sales have almost doubled those from last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the United States combined.
Singles’ Day sees Alibaba offering discounts on a wide variety of products, ranging from electronics to clothing and household items. During the 24 hour period, Alibaba handled a very impressive 1.48 billion transactions.
Alibaba raked in $25.3 billion in sales on Singles’ Day 2017. This figure does not even include some of the sales that began earlier this week in the days leading up to the actual event. It’s a 40 percent increase compared to Singles’ Day 2016. The company revealed that 90 percent of the sales were made by customers via a mobile device.
The online retail hit $18 billion in sales within 13 hours while it took Alibaba 24 hours last year to reach a record of $17.8 billion. The total sales are almost double the $12.8 billion that consumers in the United States spent between Thanksgiving until Cyber Monday last year.