FORBES : Update at 7 p.m. (EDT)/8 a.m. (Beijing time): Alibaba announced that it recorded $2 billion in gross merchandise value within the first hour, equivalent of what it accomplished in almost 9 hours last year. See the chart at the bottom of this post for a detailed comparison.
Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday – China’s Singles Day is now the world’s largest online shopping frenzy.
Starting from midnight (Beijing time) on November 11, China welcomes the e-commerce holiday of the year – the 24-hour Singles Day sale. Last year, Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group scored $5.8 billion on November 11 alone, setting a record for the e-commerce giant since it started holiday sales five years ago. That topped the combined $3.7 billion online sales of Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday from desktop computers in the U.S., according to comScore.
From Alibaba to JD.com, China’s online e-commerce giants are seeking to hit another record that could exceed $8 billion this year. Tmall.com, one of Alibaba’s leading sites, invented the 24-hour sale five years ago to take advantage of the wildly popular Singles Day, when young people in mainland China either celebrate or lament “being single.” The holiday got its name from the four “1s” in the date November 11, which look like four bare sticks. In Chinese, bare stick, or guanggun, refers to guys who are single. To target this young urban consumer population, Tmall.com started the sales with 27 merchants and has grown to include some 27,000 brands in just five years.
To Alibaba, one key focus this year is its ability to connect Chinese consumers with overseas brands and retailers. More than 200 merchants from over 20 countries will be participating to get a share of the record-breaking spending by Chinese consumers, according to the company. Chinese shoppers can now buy overseas deals not just though Alibaba’s own e-commerce sites, such as Taobao and Tmall; they can also shop at overseas retailers’ main websites and pay with Alipay, thanks to the newly-launched EPass program.
This year’s Singles Day sale also features the most heated competition among China’s leading e-commerce companies and retailers, such as JD.com, Jumei, and Vipshop. To consolidate its leadership and fence off competitors, Alibaba threatened legal actions last month and forced media outlets to pull back advertising from other companies using the phrase “Double Single.” Back in 2013, Alibaba shrewdly copyrighted the phrase “Double 11” (shuang shi yi in Chinese).
Here’s how Alibaba’s Singles Day Sale stacked up against its competitors and other online shopping days:
Alibaba’s Singles Day sale is larger than the combined e-commerce spending on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday from desktop computers in the U.S.
Alibaba’s GMV (gross merchandise value), which jumped from $8 million to a record-breaking $5.8 billion in the past five years, is expected to hit new high in 2014.
Starting with only 27 merchants in 2009, Alibaba has increased the number of participating vendors 1000 times to about 27,000 in just five years.
It only took an hour for Alibaba to reach $2 billion in GMV this year — approximately one-eighth of the time it took in 2013.
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