In the first 5 minutes of the 2016 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant processed US$1 billion via mobile phones. The company made a total of $7.2 billion in sales, in the first two hours alone.
Held over 24 hours on November 11, Singles’ Day, which already surpassed America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the largest online shopping event by value on the planet made a record US$17.79 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) this year, up 32% from 2015.
Mobile devices clocked US$14.6 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) on 657 million delivery orders, accounting for 82.07% of total volume. Compared to last year, mobile devices pushed GMV of US$9.8 billion on 467 million orders, Alibaba said.
The company processed 120,000 payment transactions per second, at peak. Some 175,000 orders were processed every second.
Customers from across the world took part in this online shopping event. Alibaba says that orders were placed from 235 countries across the globe. Adidas, Apple, Nike, Pampers, Phillips, Siemens and Uniqlo were among the most popular in their respective product categories.
“This year’s 11.11 is a preview of the future of retail, where entertainment, commerce and interactive engagement intersect seamlessly,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group.
“From the kick-off of warm-up activities to last night’s countdown gala and all the way through the 24-hour global shopping festival itself, we’ve seen unprecedented engagement between consumers and merchants. 11.11 showcased how online and offline retail will be reinvented to offer brand new shopping experiences to our hundreds of millions of mobile, digitally savvy active users,” he said.
According to Wikipedia, Alibaba Group is the world’s largest retailer as of April 2016. It’s consumer-to-consumer portal Taobao features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally.
The Group’s websites accounted for over 60% of the parcels delivered in China by March 2013. It also accounted some 80% of China’s online sales by September 2014. Alipay, an online payment escrow service, accounts for roughly half of all online payment transactions within China. Jack Ma is the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group.
[Source]– AliBaba
