While Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be the biggest online shopping days in the U.S., the total those two days bring in pales in comparison to America’s chief economic rival in the east. Earlier this month, China held its annual Single’s Day–a 24-hour Chinese shopping holiday that celebrates the pride of being alone, or single.
Single’s Day takes place on November 11 every year, and this year the Chinese shopping holiday took in a record-breaking $30.7 billion in online sales in just a single (sorry for the pun) 24-hour period.
How does that stack up against this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales? Our U.S. shopping holidays can’t compete–it’s not even close. This Black Friday took in a record-breaking $6.22 billion in online sales, and today’s Cyber Monday online sales are expected to take in another $7.8 billion. Taken together, that’s $14.02 billion–less than half of what China’s Single’s Day brought in. And again, remember that $14.02 billion in U.S. sales covers a 48-hour period. China’s Single’s Day haul took in $30.7 billion in just 24 hours.
Even adding Thanksgiving’s Thursday online sales of $3.7 billion to the mix, that still only brings U.S. online spending to $17.72 billion over a 72-hour period–yet that still doesn’t even reach two-thirds of what Chinese consumers spent online in Single’s Day’s 24-hour period.
The lesson here is that even with America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday hauls, the true king of online spending is the Chinese consumer.
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