Chinese people love to buy things. Just take a look at the results of the country’s largest shopping festival, 2017 Tmall Double 11, which took place on November 11, also known as Singles Day.
The e-commerce giant Alibaba said that over the 24 hours of the festival, gross merchandise volume (GMV) hit USD 25.3 billion, a 39% increase on the 2016 festival GMV of USD 17.8 billion.
The 2017 Tmall Double 11 shopping festival started with a bang, surpassing USD one billion in sales in about 2 minutes and reaching USD 10 billion in around one hour. The purchases kept coming, and this year’s GMV exceeded last year’s record numbers in just 13 hours.
Tmall said that 90% of all transactions were generated via mobile devices. The total online payment transactions during the festival reached 1.48 billion globally, a 41% increase YOY.
Alibaba’s smart logistics network, Cainiao Network, reported that the total number of parcel delivery orders reached 812 million.
Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group, pointed out that going global will be Alibaba’s core strategy in the next decade. The Tmall Double 11 shopping festival gala is heading abroad, too.
The festival is backed by Alipay, Alibaba’s online payment tool, which claims to provide its services to over 200 countries and regions. Besides that, Alibaba said that 89 cross-border logistics partners, which boast 231 cross-border warehouses in 225 countries and regions, are supporting them.
According to Alibaba’s data, Russia, Hong Kong, the United States, Taiwan, and Australia were the top countries or regions that bought goods from China during the shopping festival. The top countries selling goods to China, on the other hand, were Japan, the United States, Australia, Germany and South Korea. The most popular Chinese export product categories were mobile phones and clothing.
Zhang also said that Tmall is interested in helping merchants to expand their own businesses. His words are reflected by the performance of the merchants who have already signed on with Alibaba’s Tmall platform. This year, 167 merchants made over RMB 100 million in sales, while 17 merchants surpassed RMB 500 million in sales. Astonishingly, six merchants surpassed RMB 1 billion in sales.
The Double 11 shopping festival also fueled Alibaba’s rivals’ profits. Tencent-backed JD.com, China’s 2nd largest e-commerce platform, reported that its total transaction volume reached RMB 127.1 billion between November 1 and November 11.
America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday are known as the largest shopping festivals in the world. But now Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales record has shot past the numbers of those shopping events. This year’s Tmall Double 11 shopping festival’s USD 25.3 billion GMV surpassed last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. It was reported that U.S. GMV sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday accounted for USD 12.8 billion in 2016.
Let’s see what surprises Alibaba will bring us next year.
(Top photo from Alibaba)
