Singles Day, November 11th each year is the brainchild of Jack Ma’s team at Alibaba. It was initially started as a way for single people to have a special on-line shopping day to purchase products for themselves, and why not. It was a brilliant idea to say the least and here’s why:
- Singles Day has now developed into the largest on-line sales day ever
- Last week, on-line sellers on the Alibaba Group’s marketplaces tallied over $30.8 billion dollars is sales
- This year’s sales were up 27% from last year’s totals
- It took only 90 seconds for the first $1 Billion in sales to roll in
- By comparison, Cyber Monday, (the Monday after Thanksgiving) last year netted a meager $6.6 Billion in sales
- Amazon’s Prime Day this past year generated $4.2 Billion in sales
Alibaba’s main competitor, JD.com generated sales of $23 Billion in sales for the period from November 1 through November 11, during what it calls its “Singles Day Shopping Festival.”
The driving force for Singles Day as well as for all of these special sales days is price an product selection. Certainly in Alibaba’s case, the ability to showcase goods from all over the world, especially trendy US Brands, such as Estee Lauder, Nike, Buick, Dyson and Levi’s clearly had tremendous appeal not only from Chinese buyers but buyers from all over the world.
So how high can these one day sales go? We suspect Singles Day sales will continue to grow year over year as new products are showcased each and every year. The same can be said for Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day and JD.Com. It’s hard to imagine, but we believe we have just scratched the surface on these sales figures.
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