And again Alibaba broke all records during this year’s Singles’ day with an increase of more than 32 percent compared to last year. The platform noted over $17.8 billion worth of sales during the 24-hour e-commerce extravagance, which resulted in 175.000 orders per second in the first hour.
To put that in perspective, it is about the same as all the eCommerce spending in Brazil for the whole year of 2016.
Singles day was originated in 1990 as an anti-Valentine’s Day. Alibaba started using it in 2009 to promote discounts on its e-commerce platform in order to boost revenue in a traditionally quiet sales period before Chinese New Year.
Another record was set last year due to the amount of International brands participating in the sales event. Over 14.000 international brands participated which accounted for 30 percent of the total orders which came from 207 different countries and regions.
Source: Alibaba group