What started as a day for single people to celebrate their relationship (or lack thereof) was turned into a day for shopping and deal hunting. And this year marks the 10th year since Alibaba turned Singles Day into the largest shopping bonanza in the world.
Owing to the immense success of the event every year, a concert – or gala, as Alibaba’s online retail store Tmall prefers to call it – began being the preceding event that counts down to 11 November itself. This started in 2015, and now it’s as much an annual event as the 11.11 shopping festival itself.
Incidentally, the event was also revealed to be an annual server stress test. Fitting, considering the sheer volume of traffic that’s expected to go through the brand’s systems during the following 24 hours.
Last year, shoppers who went through the conglomerate’s platform spent a total of RMB168.2 billion (~RM101.16 billion) in the single day of 11 November. The previous year’s record was also broken 12 hours through. We’ll probably see a similar development this year. And it won’t be long before we find out.
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