Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese eCommerce giant, saw gross merchandise volume of $25.3 billion for this year’s Singles Day Global Shopping Festival, up 39 percent from a year ago. What’s more, 90 percent of the total gross merchandise volume for the 24-hour shopping event was settled through Ant Financial’s Alipay. In a press release, the Chinese online retailer said that in 2016, 82 percent of gross merchandise volume was settled through Alipay, underscoring Chinese consumers’ growing preference for digital payments.
“More than US$25 billion of GMV in one day is not just a sales figure,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group. “It represents the aspiration for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail.”
In this year’s shopping event, which dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., 140,000 brands and merchants participated, with Alipay processing 1.48 billion total payment transactions – which is up 41 percent from last year. At its peak during the shopping event, Alipay processed 256,000 transactions per second. Alibaba Cloud also processed 325,000 orders per second at peak, with Cainiao Network processing 812 million total delivery orders. Cainiao Network had the first delivery arrive in 12 minutes and 18 seconds after midnight.
On the merchant front, Alibaba said 60,000 international brands and merchants participated. What’s more, 167 merchants each generated more than $15.1 million in sales, while 17 merchants had sales that exceeded $75.4 million and six surpassed $150.9 million in sales.
The top countries selling to China during the shopping event included Japan, the U.S., Australia, Germany and South Korea.
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