The Scale of Alibaba's Singles' Day Haul

The Alibaba Group posted yet another sales record on Singles’ Day. Having netted the first $1 billion in sales after just 68 seconds, the Chinese e-commerce giant clocked another $37.4 billion in gross merchandise sales across its platforms in the remaining 23 hours, 58 minutes and 52 seconds of what is arguably the biggest shopping frenzy in the world.

Last year, Alibaba’s Singles’ Day gross merchandise volume (GMV) had amounted to $30.8 billion, up from $25.3 billion in 2017. According to the company’s press release on the matter, more than 200,000 brands participated in this year’s event, of which 299 surpassed RMB100 million ($14.3 million) in sales. The most popular brands were international powerhouses such as Apple, Bose, Nike, H&M and Uniqlo who were among the 15 brands to surpass 1RMB billion ($143 million) in sales over the course of 24 hours.

To put the scale of Alibaba’s Singles’ Day in perspective, the following chart compares yesterday’s $38.4 billion haul to the average daily GMV of Alibaba itself and U.S. e-commerce powerhouses Amazon and eBay. In 2018, Amazon, widely considered the most important e-commerce platform in the world, sold an average of $0.8 billion worth of physical goods on its platform each day, including sales from third-party sellers. That means it would have taken Amazon 50 days to equal the amount of merchandise sold across Alibaba’s vast online shopping universe on Monday.