Success of 2020 event cemented its position as the world’s biggest shopping holiday.
The Singles Day 2020 event saw consumer spending on Alibaba’s ecommerce platform reach $74.1 billion, setting a new record.
Indeed, the figure dwarfed other shopping festivals – including the recent Amazon Prime Day – with Alibaba merchants selling $40 billion in the first half hour of Singles Day 2020 alone.
According to research data by Stock Apps, Alibaba’s gross merchandise value for the 2019 event was $38 billion, nearly half the 2020 figure. Though it is typically a 24-hour event, this year it ran for two weeks, beginning on November 1 all the way through to midnight on November 12.
This year’s event had 800 million shoppers participating, reported Stock App. On November 11, Alibaba’s B2C site Tmall offered over 16 million products from at least 250,000 brands. At the peak of the event, there was an average of 583,000 orders placed per second.
Of the 250,000 brands, 31,000 were foreign, coming from over 220 countries and regions. American brands had the highest international sales to China during the event, racking up sales worth $5.4 billion.
To help put the enormity of the figures into context, Amazon Prime Day 2020 sales stood at $10.4 billion (up from $7.16 billion in 2019) according to Practical ecommerce.
And when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these, too, are dwarfed – in 2019, Cyber Monday sales in the US totaled $7.9 billion according to Statista. Black Friday and Thanksgiving added $9.7 billion to this figure, leading to a $17.6 billion weekend total.
As a result of the pandemic, 2020’s event saw Alibaba scaling down on live events, opting instead for livestreams. According to Alibaba, there were around 400 company executives, as well as 300 celebrities holding livestreams at Singles Day 2020.
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