Some of you might be familiar with the terms ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’. They are American shopping events where anything and everything is on sale at great prices. They pull in huge amounts of cash every year but guess what? They aren’t the biggest online retail sales in the world. Keep reading to know it.
’11.11 Shopping Festival’ or Single’s Day, is an event that started in 2009 and encouraged single people to buy gifts for themselves. Now, it has grown into a commercial phenomenon.
In this year’s event, Alibaba shipped more than $9.34 billion worth of items with total of 278 million orders. Interestingly, more than 43% of the orders were placed from mobile devices. What’s amazing is that last year’s $6 billion sale record — set during previous year — was broken in just 14 hours.
If you want the numbers to be put into perspective, American retailers grossed around $5.29 billion on Black Friday last year, combined. Ebay’s daily sales last year were roughly $23 million and Amazon’s daily product sales in 2013 were estimated to be $166 million. That is a mere 2% of what Alibaba made yesterday.
Alibaba’s sales were helped by significant discounts on products as well as the company’s ‘Pre-Sales Initiative’ program, through which merchants advertised the discounts on products as early as October. Customers simply paid the deposits and everything was processed and shipped on Singles Day.
Alibaba also took the whole event global this year. There were more than 27,000 retailers including foreign brands like Calvin Klein that helped with interest from outside China. Overall, the Single’s Day festival reached consumers in over 200 countries.
Alibaba has recently been making a lot of headlines and this is just another crown in their jewel. They had their IPO in New York almost two months ago and that generated over $25 billion. That makes the company bigger than Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Intel already and from the look of things they are just getting started.
