Singles Day's new sales record led by Alibaba's US$25.4b, up 39.5%
Singles Day shopping festival, an online shopping initiated by Alibaba’s online shopping site nine years ago, broke the record again with 168.2 billion yuan (US$25.4 billion), adding 39.5 percent from last year’s 120.7 billion yuan,
JD.com whose shopping season kicked off on November 1, reported 127.1 billion yuan of accumulative sales over the 12-day period.
E-commerce retailers’ affiliates including logistics, payment and cloud computing services beefed up efforts to deliver synergies to support the shopping bonanza.
It took a little more than 13 hours for gross merchandise volume at Alibaba to break the transaction record for the 24-hour period last year and it’s also the first time for the e-commerce giant to fully incorporate online and offline resources with more than 100,000 smart retail stores participating in the shopping extravaganza.
“It’s an Olympic game for the business world, and it not only reflects the upgrade of consumer spending, but also creates a resonance between domestic and overseas retail and e-commerce markets,” said Alibaba chief executive officer Daniel Zhang.
He added that the Singles Day has become a window for the world to get to know China’s retail scene and It represents the consumers around the globe regardless of their nationality and origin, where retailers and businesses alike share the same vision for Singles Day, which is “an occasion for consumers to enjoy the best services and products they could have.“
The technology innovations and upgrades is the backbone of such exponential figures and it would continue to explore new ways to create new ways to enjoy the Singles Day, he noted.
As many as 157 merchants surpassed 100 million yuan sales on Alibaba platform.
Singles Day originated in an obscure holiday to celebrate being unattached, it has now turn into a window to take a peak into China’s booming consumption demand as well as business prowess, especially in the technology and retail sector.
Alibaba’s payment subsidiary Alipay said at peak moment, it handled more than 256,000 payments per second, adding 110 percent from a year ago and the request volume by Ant Financial’s proprietary database OceanBase hit 42 million per second.
Total number of payments through Alipay surged 41 percent to 1.48 billion.
E-commerce giants are now looking for new growth potential from the booming offline retail space.
Alibaba’s logistics affiliate Cainiao said more consumers in as many as 266 domestic cities have received their Singles Day merchandise through courier service thanks to the extensive warehouse and dispatch center by Cainiao’s courier company partners. A total of 812 million of logistics orders were generated during the 24-hour period.
As of 7:46 am yesterday, JD said sales volume hit 100 billion yuan since its shopping season which kicked off on November 1.
Its on-demand delivery affiliate Dada said its crowd-sourcing service completed 6 million delivery as of 3pm yesterday. It is also working with JD and Walmart to optimize delivery efficiency and to gradually cover one-hour delivery for most consumers who shop Walmart merchandise through JD platform. Four-hour express courier delivery service is also expected to cover 370 domestic cities in the near future.
Cainiao's logistics partner was fully packed with merchandise waiting to be dilivered to consumers' doorstep.
