Alibaba Singles Day 2014 sales are three times bigger than last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined

Alibaba has made over $9bn from its Singles Day sales bonanza.

 

$9.3bn (£5.67bn) worth of sales to be exact. In 24 hours. No wonder investors were so keen to get a slice of that pie earlier this year.

 

What started as a day for lonely hearts to celebrate singledom by purchasing gifts for one another, has been transformed into the world’s biggest shopping day by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.  

 

According to Alibaba, more than $9bn has been spent on Singles Day this year – over three times more than $2.9bn American consumers spent on Cyber Monday and Black Friday put together in 2013.

 

It’s also a big leap for Alibaba, who raised $5.75bn (£3.63bn) last year, and $3.04bn (£1.92bn). Singles in China must be feeling more self-piteous than ever.

 

 

Alibaba noted that a chunky 42.6 per cent of those sales had come from mobile customers.

 

Also known as 11/11, Singles Day was originally set up by unmarried students to celebrate their bachelorhood before it was morphed into the world’s biggest cyber splurge thanks to Alibaba.

 

Alibaba owns a large array of e-commerce sites including Tmall, Juhuasuan; which offers limited availability “flash sales” and Taobao; a consumer-to-consumer online marketplace.

 

The company has this year used its international sites, Tmall Global and Ali Express, to help spread the spend.

 

A number of other international companies such as Zara, American Eagle and Calvin Klein have also tried to get in on the action this year.