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Alibaba's shopping event sales hit $1 billion in 85 seconds
Chinese internet giant Alibaba is fond of crowing about its online shopping records, and that's truer than ever this year. The company's annual Global Shopping Festival, aka Singles Day, broke last year's record by selling $30.8 billion in goods across 230 countries over the space of 24 hours, a hefty 27 percent increase over the $25.3 billion from 2017. However, the initial burst also stood out. It took just 85 seconds for Alibaba to sell its first $1 billion, and an hour to top $10 billion. That's well past US holiday sales -- for context, Black Friday 2017 'only' generated $5 billion in online sales.
Internet giant Alibaba crushes one-day online shopping record
If you needed evidence that internet shopping still has room to grow, you just got it. Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba has confirmed that its annual Singles' Day sales event racked up the equivalent of more than $25.3 billion in sales, easily setting a record for the most online purchases in one day. For context, Alibaba sold just short of $18 billion last year -- this year, the company surpassed that figure slightly past the halfway mark. The 2016 Cyber Monday sale was downright tiny by comparison, mustering 'just' $3.45 billion in the US.
China smashes sales records during its version of Black Friday
In the US there's Black Friday, but in China, they get all their big online shopping discounts on November 11 aka "Singles Day" instead. As of 4:28am ET today, Alibaba's Tmall, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, has already made over $11 billion which broke last year's record of $8.97 billion. As reminded by our friends over at TechCrunch, both numbers from that platform alone beat the entire US' online sales of last year's Thanksgiving and Black Friday combined. It's no wonder Alibaba could afford to hire Frank Underwood Kevin Spacey and James Bond Daniel Craig to kick off this year's party.
