Alibaba and JD.com, the two e-commerce giants in China, have done a business of over $45 billion in one day, during the annual online shopping fiesta ‘Singles Day’.
Singles Day is a celebration of China’s lonely hearts, and is held on every November 11, has become the globe’s biggest online shopping event, with takings beat those of its US equivalents, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, collectively.
Alibaba clocked a sale of $25.3 billion in its flagship event Double 11 (also called 11.11 sale), which surpasses the previous year’s sales of $18 billion.
Besides, the total amount of sales transacted on Alibaba’s platforms was nearly four times the combined online sales of ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ in the US.
Rival online retailer JD.com also reported a very high transaction value with a worth of around $20 billion of orders. This was the eighth edition of the online shopping spree which had about 1,40,000 brands including 60,000 international.
The ninth edition of the much-anticipated 24-hour annual shopping spree nearly recorded 325,000 orders every second by Alibaba Cloud (the cloud computing arm of Alibaba) within the first hour of the shopping extravaganza, the company said.
“Singles Day is Olympic Games for Chinese merchants. Sales of 157 merchants exceed 100 million yuan; 17 merchants exceed 500 million; five merchants exceed 1 billion yuan,” said Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong.
JD.com too recorded big sales in fashion and household appliances among the most popular categories, the company said.
Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD.com, said that over the last decade online merchants have developed to become the major driving force for retail. “Consumers are increasingly focusing on quality and the experience when it comes to shopping online,” he said.
In comparison to the Chinese e-commerce space, Indian online retail is much smaller and has long way to go.
According to RedSeer Management Consulting, online retail touched $14.5-15 billion in 2016.
The consulting firm expected that e-tailers companies in India might sell more than Rs 20,000 crore ($3.3 billion) worth of goods during Diwali online sales, which would be 50 per cent higher than the last year.
Indian e-commerce companies sold $2.2 billion worth of goods in the 30-day festive period last year.
However, Indian e-commerce companies such as Flipkart, Amazon and Alibaba-backed Patm Mall refrained from releasing sure-shot numbers on the total amount of sales during weeks-long Diwali festival sales.
