Alibaba records highest Big Singles Day Sale

After 24 hours of frenzied buying and selling, and weeks of advertising and promotions before it, the Alibaba Group announced that its sales hit another titanic high on Singles Day, the November 11 shopping festival that the Chinese e-commerce behemoth cooked up a decade ago.

This was the 10th iteration of Singles Day event, which kicks off on the midnight of every year on November 11th, that is also Alibaba’s informal holiday for singles since 2009. The online festival runs for 24 hours and offers steep discounts across its e-commerce sites such as Tmall.

Alibaba smashed last year’s Singles Day sales record, clocking over $30.8 billion in the 24-hour shopping event. The gross merchandise value (GMV), a figure that shows sales across the Chinese e-commerce giant’s various shopping platforms, totaled 213.5 billion yuan (or $30.8 billion), easily beating last year’s figure of 168.2 billion yuan in just under 16 hours, up about 27% year-on-year rise. It was, however, lower than, the 39% year-on-year growth recorded in 2017. Alibaba settled roughly $1 billion within the first minute and 25 seconds after midnight, setting a new record. Also, just about an hour in, the sales surpassed $10 billion.

Alibaba hosted a gala, which kicked off on Saturday and went through to the end of the 11:11 event, featuring celebrities that included celebrities such as Allen Iverson, Cirque du Soleil, Miranda Kerr, and Mariah Carey. Jack Ma also made an appearance at the media event, marking the start of Singles Day. He, however, did not give any speech. Also, the event was attended by approximately 800 local and foreign journalists, who watched a live-streamed ticker of the sales.

During this year’s event, Alibaba said that it has worked with approximately 180,000 brands across over 200 countries, and shortly before midnight on Sunday it had sent over a billion packages. A large number of sales was registered in the first hour of the 24-hour event, with a huge queue of transactions went through for pre-ordered items. Apple, Nike and Estee Lauder were among the top brands whose transactions crossed over 100 million yuan of GMV.

The e-commerce giant this year is focusing on a strategy that is called “new retail,” the term coined by Jack Ma, through which the company is targeting to bring together the online segments of its business with the offline. The internet major is joining hands with 52 shopping malls to set up 60 pop-up stores across 12 cities in on the domestic turf.