Alibaba’s Singles Day sales reach $17.8b

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Singles’ Day shopping festival (now known as the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) broke sales record this year with a reported 120.7 billion yuan ($17.79 billion) in gross merchandise volume in just 24 hours.

The figure represents a 32% jump over last year’s 91.2 billion yuan ($14.3 billion) in transactions over Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms – B2C site Tmall.com and C2C site Taobao Marketplace.

Alizila, the news portal of the Chinese e-commerce giant, also reported that the festival saw a number of other new records set, including 98.97 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) in GMV generated on mobile devices and 657 million delivery orders, compared with $9.8 billion and 467 million, respectively, in 2015.

“There were also 1.04 billion payment transactions processed compared with 710 million last year,” the report noted.

Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, was quoted as saying that this year’s 11.11 shopping festival is a preview of the future of retail.

“11.11 showcased how online and offline retail will be reinvented to offer brand new shopping experiences to our hundreds of millions of mobile, digitally savvy active users,” he said.

The shopping marathon started on November 11 at midnight China Standard Time (CST).

An IMAX-sized data screen at the media center at the Shenzhen Universiade Sports Center in Shenzhen, China continuously flashed updates all throughout the day, complemented by live blogging reports from Alizila.

The first report at 12:017 showed that total GMV blew up to 10 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) just six minutes and 58 seconds after the sale began. Total GMV exceeded $100 million in just 40 seconds.

During the first hour of the sale, order volume also reached a record-breaking peak of 175,000 orders in one second, while 120,000 payments were settled per second at the peak.