There is no denying it; we all love shopping but the Chinese solemnly love it! That and discounts.
The E-commerce behemoth Alibaba is responsible for holding the 11.11 Shopping Feast for 24 hours each November 11th. You can say it is China’s equivalent to America’s Cyber Monday shopping craze. It accounted, last year, for a humongous $3.1 billion (CNY19.1 billion) in sales on the day, breaking the record of Cyber Monday sales of $1.98 billion last year.
With almost half a day to go, this year Chinese shopaholics have already given us another astonishing victory for Alibaba; the sales hit so far have reach last year’s total thus giving a new record.
A little after 2pm in Hangzhou, #China, & Alipay GMV figures continue to climb. #1111 has reached record numbers. pic.twitter.com/vYRsucfy5o
— Alizila.com (@Alizila) November 11, 2013
Kicking off with a bang in China at midnight, the event gathered in the first six minutes more than RMB1 billion ($164 million), as recorded by transactions made on Alipay, a breakthrough record that took 37 minutes to reach last year. The total amount of transactions made with the first hour through Alipay surpassed RMB6 billion (nearly $1 billion), with the fashion category according for about half of the sales making us think the ladies might be responsible for all the record breaking.
Some more fun statistics for you; just to show you how Chinese shoppers are more inclined to use their mobile devices for numerous activities, the mobile transactions on Alipay exceeded CNY100 million ($16.4 million) in the first 4 minutes of the 11.11 Shopping Festival.
Brands such as Gap and Uniqlo as well as other 20,000 merchants offered massive discounts on products spanning electronics, household wares and apparel.
On the other hand, the brand that’s been monopolizing the spotlight is red-hot Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, which became one of the first brands to hit CNY100 million ($16.4 million) in sales in just three minutes.
As of 1.05pm local time in China, Xiaomi became the first to reach CNY500 million ($82 million) in sales. In a ranking of products that have brought in the most money, Xiaomi’s handsets took the top four spots, with its latest flagship device Mi-3 at number one. The 110,000 Mi-3 smartphones up for sale were snapped up in a mere two minutes.
