Here's a look at the largest online shopping extravaganza of this year- Alibaba's Singles' Day

(The climbing sales figures of Alibaba/ Reuters)


In the past week, e-commerce websites, led by Flipkart’s signature Big Billion Day fought valiantly amongst themselves to make the most of the Indian festive season and be the preferred choice of every customer’s wallet. It aimed to do so by offering ridiculous discounts and taking newspapers hostage by hiding our daily dose of news behind five pages worth of advertisements.

As expected, the criminal waste of time, effort and money in publicizing these week long sales- be it Flipkart’s Big Billion Day, Amazon’s Great Indian Festive Sale or Snapdeal’s hourly deals did pay off with the websites witnessing massive sale figures.

But, were the figures any good?

At the same time that India was busy reveling in its festival of lights on Wednesday, China was bearing witness to the world’s largest online sale on a single day- riding on a tradition by the same name.

Every year, China celebrated Singles Day on November 11- a mock celebration in China for people not in relationships started in early 1990s by ‘a group of college students looking to simultaneously commiserate and revel in their single status.’

That changed six years back when e-commerce giant Alibaba transformed the extravagance into a Chinese equivalent of Cyber Monday in the US and in this year’s edition of its Singles Day sale, Alibaba broke records by bringing in $ 1 million in just the first eight minutes of the sale.

In a surprising twist of events, Alibaba’s revenue from Singles Day was even greater than the sales figures of both Cyber Monday and Black Friday, combined. Its shopping total even reportedly surpassed Facebook’s revenue last year and the GDP of Laos in 2014.

(A look at Alibaba's Single's Day sale figures)


It goes without saying that Alibaba's one-day sale figures were even greater than that of Flipkart’s (which leads in India with a 44% market-share) six-day sale bonanza.

The company’s sales rose 60% as compared to 2014 with it bringing in close to $14.5 billion over the 24-hour shopping period.

Incidentally, it took Alibaba (which holds a massive 80% share of the Chinese e-commerce market) just 12 hours to surpass its previous year’s sales, which stood at $9.3 billion. It is also expected to ship approximately 17 lakh products on orders received during the Singles Day sale.

However even Alibaba’s astronomical sale figures couldn’t salvage its declining share price; (with shares closing down 2 percent in New York) the outcome of founder Jack Ma’s cautionary remarks about growth expectations in China and its subsequent impact on the company.