Alibaba Singles’ Day
sales smash records at $6 billion
Alibaba said more than
$6 billion of goods have been sold so far during its annual Singles’ Day online
shopping frenzy, as customers jumped on heavily discounted goods to send sales
surging past 2013’s record high.
More than 39 billion
yuan ($6.4 billion) worth of goods was sold on the e-commerce giant’s websites
15 hours into the event on Tuesday, with another nine to go. Less than
eight weeks after its public share listing in New York, which set its own $25
billion record, expectations for this year are high.
Alibaba did 35 billion
yuan in business during last year’s festival, and Tech research firm IDC
predicts this year’s total gross merchandise volume (GMV) will reach $8.62
billion. Less than 18 minutes into this year’s “11.11 Shopping Festival”,
GMV had already hit $1 billion, the company said.
The numbers are
boosted by Alibaba’s “pre-sales initiative”. Merchants advertised Singles’ Day
prices as early as Oct. 15, taking deposits for the items but only processing
full payments and shipping the goods on Singles’ Day itself. Though the
27,000 vendors that take part can boost their sales and gain customers by being
featured on Alibaba’s Singles’ Day shopping sites, some have also complained
the sharp discounts and cut-throat corporate rivalry undercut the benefits.
Chinese e-commerce
rival JD.com said on its official Twitter account that orders in the first 10
hours of Singles’ Day had more than doubled compared with last year, up 140
percent. China’s Xiaomi,
the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, which also uses the
Singles’ Day festival to boost turnover, said on its official Weibo account its
sales had so far surpassed 1.2 billion yuan, selling more than 853,000 phones.
The “11.11 Shopping
Festival”, which Alibaba says is the world’s biggest 24-hour online sale, began
in 2009 when just 27 merchants on the company’s Tmall.com site offered deep
discounts to boost sales during an otherwise slack period.
This year’s festival
is global, reaching shoppers in more than 200 countries, the company said.
Reuters
