Chinese Singles' Day Blows Away U.S. Cyber Week

While Americans are slowly easing into the holiday shopping season with Thanksgiving weekend two weeks away, China is getting ready for what may well be the biggest online shopping event in the world: Singles’ Day. Originally conceived by young people celebrating the joy of being single, November 11 (11.11. – each digit representing a single person) has evolved into a huge shopping event, with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba particularly successful in marketing the occasion.

Ever since the day's inception as a shopping holiday in 2009, Alibaba has posted new Singles’ Day sales records each year, until 2022 that is, when the company just said that results were "in line with last year’s GMV performance despite macro challenges and Covid-related impact". In 2021, Alibaba had reported $84.5 billion in Singles' Day sales. By that time, the annual shopping extravaganza had evolved into a multi-day affair though, with deals spread across two sale windows spanning several days and almost 300,000 brands participating.

Compared to Singles' Day, Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the biggest online shopping days in the United States, look like exercises in frugality. According to Adobe, U.S. consumers spent $11.3 billion online on Cyber Monday last year and another $9.1 billion on Black Friday. Combined with Thanksgiving day sales of $5.3 billion and $9.6 billion in online sales on the weekend in between, total Cyber Week sales amounted to $35.3 billion in 2022, marking a new record.