Singles Day is an online shopping festival in China that’s organized before Black Friday. It started out as a small online shopping festival but it has grown into a behemoth in its own right. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has released the official figures for this year, it sold a record $17.7 billion in products on Singles Day 2016.
Alibaba reaches this figure by calculating the gross merchandise volume sold on November 11th. It sold $17.79 billion worth of products combined in a single day, up from 32 percent from Singles Day 2015. The company also added that 82.07 percent of all transactions were made on mobile.
The online shopping event was held on November 11th and the company broke through $7.2 billion in sales in the first two hours alone. Alibaba processed $1 billion through its mobile payment platform Alipay in the first five minutes, it took eight minutes for this to happen last year.
It merits mentioning here that while the 32 percent growth rate over the past year seems impressive, it’s slower than the growth rate we saw last year when sales jumped almost 60 percent compared to what they were in 2014.
Customers from across the globe took part in this online shopping event. Alibaba says that orders were placed from 235 countries across the globe. International brands such as Nike, Uniqlo, Adidas, and Phillips participated in the online shopping event as well.