Alibaba's Singles' Day Breaks Online Shopping Records

Source: Alibaba

Alibaba's Global Shopping Festival, also known as Singles' Day, sold $30.8 billion in goods over 24 hours across 230 countries. This year's online shopping record beat last year's record during the Global Shopping Festival of $25.3 billion by 27%, and easily topped the $5 billion in online sales that occurred in the United States during Black Friday. Artificial intelligence helped the 200,000 offline smart stores and 180,000 brands over the 24 hour period with sales forecasting, inventory management, pricing strategy, and product assortment. Alibaba CEO, Daniel Zhang, stated at the conclusion of the Festival that Alibaba will try to take the entire consumer retail market online. 

Statistics:

• 20 seconds- within the first 20 seconds of the sale, gross merchandising volume broke $155 million.
• 1 min 30 seconds - within the first minute and thirty seconds, gross merchandising volume broke $1billion.
• 1 hour 1 minute- gross merchandise volume exceeded $10 billion within 1 hour and 48 seconds

For context, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday generated last year a combined total of $14.49 billion. 

The top five countries that sold to China during the Global Shopping Festival were Japan, the United States, Korea, Australia, and Germany.

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