During the two-week shopping events until November 11, 2021, also known as Singles' Day shopping festival, Chinese consumer spending on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms amounted to 84.54 billion U.S. dollars. Singles’ Day online sales in China usually surpass the U.S. Cyber Monday sales, Black Friday or any other 24-hour shopping campaign by a wide margin making it the biggest shopping holiday in the world.

What is Singles’ Day?  

The holiday is believed to have started in the early 1990s as a student initiative to celebrate their singledom. November 11 (or 11.11) was chosen to represent solitary figures (singles). In 2009, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group created the connection between Singles’ Day and online shopping as the company tried to generate sales for its Tmall platform by offering special pricings and promotions. Since the successful Alibaba’s shopping festival launch, other e-commerce platforms in China besides Tmall and Taobao have also implemented sales on Singles’ Day, profiting immensely from millions of netizens on shopping sprees.

What are the drawbacks of the festival?   

Many argue that the Singles’ Day bonanza encourages people to shop irrationally and wastefully. Alibaba’s logistics alone delivers around a billion orders placed on that day that require cardboard boxes as well plastic wraps and packaging – a huge burden to the environment. It is also a day of overtime and chaos for many workers in thousands of warehouses and courier units across the country. Finally, no matter how good the sales bargains might be, a considerable portion of the Chinese population still cannot afford to participate. Hence the sense of inequality and the income gap becomes even more evident on Singles’ Day.

In 2009, Alibaba Group created the connection between Singles Day and online shopping as the company tried to generate sales for its Tmall unit by offering special pricing and promotions within a 24 hour period. Today, Singles Day online sales surpass U.S. Cyber Monday sales by a wide margin with online shoppers placing more than 2.3 billion orders on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao e-commerce properties during the Singles Day sales.

A challenge for couriers China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba announced its GMV on Singles’ Day hit 74.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. The one-day shopping craze resulted in a tremendous amount of packages waiting to be delivered. Owning to the express delivery companies’ efficiency, consumers in China have become accustomed to short delivery times. According to China’s State Post Bureau, around 2.8 billion packages were distributed and delivered in the week following Singles’ Day in 2019. Red envelopes on Singles’ Day For most young Chinese, red envelopes not only represent gifts of lucky money on Chinese New Year, but also a way to secure the best deal at the Singles’ Day sales. To improve consumer engagement, Alibaba developed an elaborate sales scheme for its Singles’ Day sale, such as pre-sale deals and coupons. Consumers could also play various games to receive coupons (or red envelopes) for extra discounts on Singles’ Day.

This statistic presents mobile share of consumer spending on Alibaba's Tmall and Taobao e-commerce properties during the 24-hour Singles Day sales. In 2017, mobile buyers on tablets and smartphones accounted for 90 percent of GMV. In 2009, Alibaba Group created the connection between Singles Day and online shopping as the company tried to generate sales for its Tmall unit by offering special pricings and promotions within a 24 hour period. Today, Singles Day online sales surpass U.S. Cyber Monday sales by a wide margin.

According to a survey conducted in late 2024, nearly a quarter of consumers around the world are at least somewhat aware of what Singles' Day is. That said, the majority of shoppers outside of Asia have never heard of the event before. What is Singles’ Day? Singles' Day, which takes place on November 11th each year, is China’s largest shopping festival. Originally celebrated in jest by individuals without a romantic partner, it evolved into a major shopping event when Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba leveraged the day to offer round-the-clock shopping discounts on its online platform. Today, Singles’ Day is the largest online shopping event globally, based on sales value and number of shoppers. In 2022, Singles’ Day sales hit nearly 85 billion U.S. dollars – more than twice sales generated during Cyber week, its American e-commerce festival counterpart. In 2021, a staggering total of 1.16 billion packages were transported in China on just 11 November itself, a testament to the domestic popularity of the event, which had in that year morphed into a three-week long shopping event. China’s e-commerce landscape China’s e-commerce industry has experienced astounding growth in the past decade, with gross merchandise volume reaching nearly 44 trillion yuan in 2022 – more than five times of what it was in 2012. The manufacturing superpower is now the most penetrated e-commerce market worldwide, with nearly half of its retail sales conducted over the internet in 2023. Behind the strength of the e-commerce industry is formidable market of around 900 million online shoppers living in China.

In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, the Chinese e-commerce corporation Alibaba Group recorded a revenue of around 434.9 billion yuan in Chinese online sales. This translates to approximately 60.2 billion U.S. dollars.

China's e-commerce market and Alibaba

In 2023, the gross merchandise volume of China's e-commerce market amounted to around 15.4 trillion yuan and was expected to grow further in the coming years. Some of the factors contributing to this growth are increased internet penetration and ever-growing spending power of the general population, but also the expansion of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

The revenue of Alibaba Group reached 941 billion yuan (approximately 130.4 billion U.S. dollars) in financial year 2024. Alibaba’s most prominent e-commerce websites include Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, cross-border e-commerce platforms AliExpress and Kaola.com, a developer of platforms for cloud computing and data management called Alibaba Cloud, as well as O2O fresh food service Freshippo. Its payment provider Ant Group, formerly known as Alipay or Ant Financial, has been spun off in 2014 into an independent company.

Singles' Day

The company’s most profitable day in a year is a Singles' Day, a popular Chinese festival functioning like the antithesis of Valentine’s Day. On November 11, Chinese singles throughout the country celebrate being single and proud, especially by treating themselves with presents. During the Singles' Day sales in 2021, Alibaba's online retail platforms recorded a total GMV amounting to more than 84.5 billion U.S. dollars.

The largest Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba had another strong quarter in the beginning of 2022. The annual active consumers on its online shopping properties in China reached 903 million by the first quarter of 2022, increasing from 882 million in the previous quarter.

Alibaba business

Founded in 1999, the Alibaba Group grew up to be the leading company providing all kinds of e-commerce services. Besides its most famous marketplaces including Alibaba.com (B2B), Taobao (C2C), and Tmall (B2C), Alibaba also provides leading electronic payment service Alipay, cloud computing services and other related services to meet all needs in e-commerce. Alibaba holds different sale festivals regularly on its online marketplaces to promote sales performance. On its annual 11.11 (Singles’ Day) Global Shopping Festival in 2021, another record was made in gross merchandise volume (GMV) of Alibaba’s marketplaces.

E-commerce in China

China has the largest number of online shoppers in the world. Due to less developed physical stores and cheap logistic services, e-commerce market is growing rapidly in third-and-lower tier cities in recent years. And as people are getting more aware of international brands, cross-border online shopping is becoming a trend too. With online shopping portals and convenient electronic payment methods, China’s consumers can find products with high quality and competitive price more and more easily.

This statistic presents the share of mobile online consumer spending at Chinese online retailers on Singles Day 2016 compared with the share of U.S. mobile consumer spending on Black Friday and Cyber Monday of the same year. It was found that whereas the overall mobile sales share of Cyber Monday sales in the United States amounted to 35 percent, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba generated 82 percent of all Singles Day sales via mobile. Both Cyber Monday and Singles Day are the biggest online retailing days in their respective home markets.

In 2023, Chinese consumers spent on average 297 yuan per order during the Singles' Day sales, showing a steady increase over the past years. That year, around 615.8 million packages of goods were sold during the Singles' Day shopping festival.

In 2023, Alibaba ranked first among China's comprehensive e-commerce retailers, with a market share of 46 percent. JD.com ranked second with a GMV share of 27.2 percent. E-commerce retail in ChinaChina has become one of the world’s largest e-commerce markets. As a major driver of the country’s retail economy, e-commerce sales share experienced a considerable rise from 10.6 percent of the total retail sales in 2014, to about 27.6 percent in 2023. The e-commerce retail sales value was estimated to reach 3.99 trillion U.S. dollars by 2026. Alibaba: the e-commerce giantEstablished in 1999, Alibaba.com was founded by Jack Ma, who stepped down as chairman in September 2019. Initially, Alibaba was a traditional e-commerce company but has now transformed into a conglomerate. It has a wide range of business including services such as financial, logistics, digital media, and cloud computing. In fiscal year 2023, the revenue of Alibaba amounted to around 868.7 billion yuan. The number of active consumers across Alibaba's online shopping properties reached 903 million in the first quarter of 2022. Alibaba Group launched the Singles’ Day marketing plan in 2008, focusing on offering numerous discounts, red packet coupons, and promotions to improve sales on November 11 (or 11.11). This date was chosen to represent single people among Chinese youth from the early 1990s. In 2021, Alibaba's gross merchandise volume on Singles' Day skyrocketed to 84.54 billion U.S. dollars. This represented an astonishing growth from 0.82 billion U.S. dollars just a decade earlier.

Singles' Day is a shopping festival that was inaugurated in 1993. Since then, the event has grown in popularity not just in China but around the Western world as well. Celebrated on November 11, Singles' Day is reported to have generated 30.8 billion US dollars on Alibaba in 2019.

In Europe, between 2019 and 2020, sales made during Singles' Day was expected to see a general increase. According to forecasts, sales made during Singles' Day in 2020 are predicted to reach 1.44 billion British pounds in the United Kingdom, the highest among the European countries displayed here.

Im Jahr 2021 lag der Wert der Warenverkäufe (Gross Merchandise Value - GMV), der am Singles' Day über Alibaba generiert wurde, weltweit bei rund 84,5 Milliarden US-Dollar. Der Singles' Day findet normalerweise jedes Jahr am 11. November statt und wird von zahlreichen E-Commerce-Aktionen begleitet. In den Jahren 2022 und 2023 hielt sich der chinesische Onlinehändler bedeckt und veröffentlichte keine Zahlen zum Schnäppchentag.

The retail trade revenue of communication devices in China in December 2024 was more than 74 billion yuan. November of 2024 saw the highest revenue of the last years by sales amounting to over 83 billion yuan. The spike could be a result of Singles Day. It takes place on November 11 of every year, and on that day, online retailers offer large discounts on their products. For Double 11 of 2021, Alibaba reported sales totaling 314.6 billion yuan which was more than two times the value of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States combined.