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Alibaba says Singles Day sales brought in a record $31 billion this year

To put that in perspective, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the U.S. only topped $14.1 billion last year.

Alibaba says Singles Day sales brought in a record $31 billion this year

A screen shows Alibaba’s sales volume exceeding 100 billion yuan after one hour during 2019 Alibaba 11.11 Global Shopping Festival on November 11, 2019 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. [Photo: VCG/VCG via Getty Images]

BY Michael Grothaus1 minute read

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba says all kinds of records were broken on this year’s Singles Day. The shopping holiday is held in China on November 11 every year and ostensibly celebrates people’s pride in being single, but in the last few years has just become an excuse for holding the biggest online sales day of the year.

Singles Day 2019 got off to a roaring start with Alibaba saying that online sales topped $12 billion in just the first hour after midnight (which is when Singles Day sales begin).

By 6:30 in the morning—just six and a half hours of sales—that number grew to $20 billion.

And just 16 and a half hours into the Singles Day 2019 sales, Alibaba brought in $31 billion in sales, exceeding the record for 2018. To put that in perspective, in 2018 Black Friday sales in the U.S. only totaled $6.2 billion and Cyber Monday 2018 sales totaled another $7.9 billion, according to SalesCycle.

Shortly after that time the company also announced that the number of orders surpassed 1 billion. That’s nearly seven hours faster than orders reached that milestone last year.

https://twitter.com/AlibabaGroup/status/1193835013558566912

And as CNN reports, Singles Day pre-order sales also got off to a roaring start for some companies. Estée Lauder brought in $143 million in sales of its products and consumers in China bought $14 million worth of iPhone 11s.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Grothaus is a novelist and author. He has written for Fast Company since 2013, where he's interviewed some of the tech industry’s most prominent leaders and writes about everything from Apple and artificial intelligence to the effects of technology on individuals and society. Michael’s current tech-focused areas of interest include AI, quantum computing, and the ways tech can improve the quality of life for the elderly and individuals with disabilities More


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