Alibaba records RMB 168.2 Billion in Singles’ Day Sales

On this year’s Singles’ day, Alibaba’s total GMV exceeded RMB 168.2 billion (more than $25.3 billion), and a whopping 812 million delivery orders were made, with 90% of the GMV coming from mobile. During the 24 hours, 1.48 billion payment transactions were processed, with a 41% YoY growth.

“On November 11, 167 merchants surpassed RMB 100 million in sales, 17 merchants surpassed RMB 500 million in sales, and 6 merchants surpassed RMB 1 billion in sales,” Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group remarked.

While this year’s sale day smashed last year’s records, now the new goal for Alibaba is globalization. This year’s sales event showed clearly how Alibaba’s shopping festival is gradually converging China and the rest of the world. Alibaba reported that 225 countries and regions with completed transactions.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Top 5 countries selling cross-border to China by GMV were Japan, United States, Australia, Germany, and South Korea.
• Top 5 imported brands bought by Chinese consumers by GMV were Swisse, Aptamil (爱他美), Kao / Merries (花王／妙而舒), Moony and Bio Island.
• Top 5 countries/regions buying cross-border from China by GMV were Russia, Hong Kong, United States, Taiwan and Australia.
• Top 5 export product categories from China by GMV were mobile phones, wool coats, knitted sweaters, dresses, and sweaters.

Alibaba’s online finance arm, Ant Financial announced that Alipay processed around 256,000 payment transactions per second at its peak within the first 10 minutes of the shopping festival. This was made possible by Ant Financial’s proprietary finance-grade distributed relational database, OceanBase, which processed 42 million requests per second at its peak. The company also reported that a total of 1.48 billion transactions were processed by Alipay in the entire 24 hours and Alipay processed 100 million transactions in the first 7 minutes 23 seconds of the shopping festival.