Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) Singles’ Day sales have crushed all previous record, rising beyond $6 billion, according to the website itself. The largest online retailer noted that the customers grabbed the heavily discounted goods to help peak sales beyond 2013 record high.
Proactive sales strategy helping
In fifteen hours into the event on Tuesday, goods totaling 39 billion Yuan were already sold on Alibaba, with nine hours still left. The company announced that it has sold $2 billion worth of goods in the first hour.
Last year, during the festive season Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) earned 35 billion Yuan in revenue, and according to Tech research firm IDC, this year’s gross merchandise volume will total to $8.62 billion. The company noted that after 18 minutes into Year’s “11.11 shopping festival,” GMV touched $1 billion.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) is reaping benefits of its “pre sale initiative,” as merchants started promoting Singles’ Day prices as early as October 15th, receiving the deposits for the items and processing full payments and shipping the products on the event day.
Around 27,000 vendors, who took part in the shopping festival of Alibaba, are earning huge revenue, but some of them argued that massive discounts and cut throat corporate rivalry has subdued their profits.
Other players also reaping benefits
Alibaba’s competitor JD.com published on its official Twitter account that orders in the first 10 hours of Singles’ Day is more than two times of last year. Xiaomi Technology, the World’s third-largest smartphone maker, is also cashing on the Singles’ Day festive to increase its sales. The Chinese smartphone maker said on its Weibo account that its sales had so far gone beyond 1.2 billion yuan shipping more than 853,000 phones.
According to Alibaba, the 11.11 shopping Festival is the World’s largest 24-hours online sale event, and its root back to 2009 when only 27 merchants on the company’s Tmall.com site gave big cuts in prices to enhance sales during an otherwise sluggish period. The company said that this year’s sale is global reaching more than 200 countries.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA)’s executive chairman Jack Ma said last week, “I bet the number [of goods bought] is going to be scary.” He estimated that 200 million packages will be shipped in connection to the sales on the day.
