China’s Alibaba Group experienced its best Singles Day shopping event to date last week.
The event, which is annually held on November 11 each year, processed nearly 1.5 billion transactions on that day, reports say.
Alibaba Group created Singles Day back in 2009 as an annual shopping bonanza with various sales and offers. It is something similar to Black Friday in the U.S., although Singles Day sales figures have routinely dwarfed Black Friday volumes for the past few years.
This staggering growth can be seen in a chart by created by ATLAS, which shows the sales from Alibaba’s Singles Day in 2012 to be around $3 billion. That’s compared to 2017’s $25.3 billion, and about 90% of that number came from Alibaba’s mobile payment service, Alipay.
Last year, Alibaba’s final sales amount was $17.8 billion, which means this year the group saw a 42.2% increase.
See Atlas’ Chart here.