In One Hour, Alibaba’s Singles Day Sales Hit $10 Billion<br />The event’s date, written numerically as 11/11, was associated with unattached singles, known as “bare sticks.”<br />This year’s shopping festival entered new territory, blazing past $1 billion within two minutes of the holiday, starting at midnight on Saturday.<br />In July, Prime Day generated an estimated $1 billion in revenue during its 30-hour sale window, resulting in what Amazon called<br />its “biggest day ever.” A little more than an hour into this year’s Singles Day, sales had already exceeded $10 billion.<br />Singles Day — the frenzied annual celebration of consumption and commerce<br />that is China’s much larger version of Black Friday — began as a protest of sorts against Valentine’s Day, propelled by college students in the 1990s.<br />Singles Day is now inextricably linked with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce leviathan<br />that in recent years has turned the holiday into an online — and occasionally brick-and-mortar — mercantile extravaganza.<br />The company promised delivery within an hour for certain products and, in advance of the shopping festival, converted nearly 100,000<br />stores across China into “smart stores” capable of processing payment using facial recognition and other advanced technologies.<br />One offer, from the Chongqing-based online alcohol brand Jiang Xiao Bai, allowed 33 fast-moving customers to<br />make a single payment of 11,111 yuan, or $1,673, for a lifetime supply of a grain liquor known as baijiu.
