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Businesses China

Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles' Day (bloomberg.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the shopathon dept.
Alibaba Group posted $1 billion (6.81 billion yuan) of sales within the first five minutes of its Singles' Day sales, a 24-hour event that may offer clues on the health of the Chinese economy and its largest online retailer. From a report on Bloomberg:Investors are keeping a close eye on the annual Nov. 11 spending blitz that dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., to see if Alibaba can reprise the 60 percent leap in transactions to 91.2 billion yuan it managed last year. The e-commerce giant again turned up the star-wattage for 2016, enlisting Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, sports celebrity David Beckham, basketball legend Kobe Bryant and pop-rock band One Republic to headline a pre-sale gala and drum up international attention. Pioneered by Alibaba in 2009 and since replicated by rivals including JD.com Inc., Singles' Day has become somewhat of a barometer of Chinese consumer sentiment.
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Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles' Day More

Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles' Day

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  • One big well advertised week where your systems are already jammed with orders? How in the world do they avoid getting hit by every single DDOS extortion outfit at once?
    • Same as amazon. Have the redundancy and machine power to cope with it. They might not even be able to tell the difference at peak times.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      china has no problem cutting off border routers to stop outside traffic and a DDOS from within china would be actual suicide.

  • Does this Amazon like company matter to those in the west? Just want to know. How much of this billion dollars was because of activity from the west?

    How many of people in the west even know about Alibaba?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Does this Amazon like company matter to those in the west? Just want to know. How much of this billion dollars was because of activity from the west?

      How many of people in the west even know about Alibaba?

      Well, very little in the west, but it's quite important as everything is on there. A lot of suppliers are, so if you're needing some random item from China, chances are you can order it online via Alibaba.

      If you need a source of cheap cables, Alibaba would be where you wanted to go to get dozens of oddball

    • They don't care. The East is bigger than the West.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zdzichu ( 100333 )

      Of course! Majority of ebay/allegro sellers are just middlemen buying stuf from alibaba and reselling locally. More and more people are aware of this scheme and just go to alibaba directly.

      • I buy phone parts (screens, batteries, etc) from AliExpress on a regular basis.

        Many sellers offer an express shipping option to have it here in 4-5 business days. In many cases it's still cheaper to get what I need from AliExpress even with paying extra for express shipping.

        Most recently I bought 2 replacement screen/lcd/digitizer for my phone. Cost $70 with shipping and was here in a week. For the record I have a Motorola X Play (not available in the US).

    • Does this Amazon like company matter to those in the west?

      It's the largest retailer in Asia. It's a global economy, if Asia goes into recession, we go into recession.

    • AliExpress is pretty decent if you don't mind waiting for your order, sometimes in the vicinity of 20-49 days. Rush shipping to ~1week (via DHL) cost me ~$12 for my Xiaomi phone. Unfortunately their payment processor is Russian and you can't use it in the States -- although I heard rumblings a while back now that PayPal had cut some kind of deal with AliBaba, I haven't seen anything come of it yet.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by fubarrr ( 884157 )

        >heard rumblings a while back now that PayPal had cut some kind of deal with AliBaba

        Well, they dropped Baba as a customer and banned every Aliexpress merchant back in 2011 or late 2010.

        Why would Paypal work for a competitor?

    • The sale is rolling by timezone. As I type this in, the sale will be starting in about 9 hours 15 minutes from where I live.

      So, that was all China.

      Aliexpress is getting bigger in the US. It is the same factory sources as many US companies, so the build quality is very similar and the prices are often significantly less. They also reflect the chinese tech market and that can be several years ahead of the US domestic sales market.

    • "How many of people in the west even know about Alibaba?"

      I buy all my clothes there (Aliexpress) for years, you select 'free shipping' and can also order small stuff f.ex. earrings for 75 cents and they ship them to you for free.

      Sports clothes are unbeatable there.

      After all, since all the clothes are made by Chines children, why not order them directly from the kids, and circumvent all the rest of the chain. :-)

    • Thats the whole point! They are BIGGER than west counterparts and still growing fast.
      Its a pretty big signal for Chinese, they can care less and less about west. Their well being is no longer linked to the amount of crap west imports from Asia.

  • Scarlett Johansson co-starred in the 2003 Bill Murray movie 'Lost In Translation', about a fading American movie star in Tokyo doing an advertising gig for a liquor company. Now she's in China doing an advertising gig for Alibaba. The last time I checked she was hardly 'fading' though...

  • Have we all forgotten the true spirit of Singles Day?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Have we all forgotten the true spirit of Singles Day?

      I figured it was to go shopping, in the hope the accumulation of material possessions would ease the loneliness?

    • Have we all forgotten the true spirit of Singles Day?

      Yeah, what about the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength?

  • From the article:

    Singles' Day was invented by college students in the 1990s as a counter to Valentine's Day according to the Communist Party-owned People's Daily. Written numerically, Nov. 11 is reminiscent of "bare branches," a local expression for bachelors and spinsters.

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