Alibaba's Singles' Day sales exceed predictions at $9.3B

[redwood]

That's one site doing 3x the combined total sites' 2013 Cyber Monday.

Pivotal moment as the center of gravity of the world's consumer economy shifts to China.

The fervent dive into consumerism is incredible. Anyone in China seeing a counter culture emerging against this? Or is it too early

[melling]

Yes, we're in the Century of China. It's amazing how far China has come in the past 15 years. Next person on the moon will be from China? 20,000 miles of high-speed rail? Largest subway system in the world. From 0 to the biggest in 20 years. The largest everything...

[jobu]

What is Alibaba's take from those sales? Is it a straight percentage, or scaled based on the vendor's volume?

[BobMarz]

Consumerization of PRC!

from the article: "Please Singles' Day, can you pass by quickly?," reads a typical comment. "I didn't think I needed anything until today when I feel like I need everything I see. I'm so helpless!"

[w1ntermute]

Singles' Day sales that reveal a lot: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-11/09/content_188894...

[spydum]

sooo, not exactly related to Alibaba, but they sure do take this Singles Day thing seriously?! that is a heck of a sales promo stunt

[adventured]

Here's an interesting fact that a lot of people don't seem to realize about Alibaba: they're an advertising company. They generate over 50% of their revenue from ads.

[irollboozers]

Makes you think about the sheer amount of traffic. Incredible.

[westiseast]

I blogged about this the last two years - it's an incredible technical challenge as well as the huge sales side of things. Amazing

[mrfusion]

I must be misunderstanding Alibaba. I thought it was related to buying wholesale goods to resell?

[smtddr]

Alibaba.com is geared towards wholesale, aliexpress.com is geared more for single item(s) purchases. I've been buying stuff from Aliexpress for years.

Both Aliexpress.com and Alibaba.com belong to the same company; i.e. my login works on both websites.

Kinda like Myhabit.com's login is the same as your Amazon.com's login.

[paulrosenzweig]

Alibaba.com is for wholesale, but Alibaba the company is much broader than that. They have two big consumer sites: Taobao.com and Tmall.com

[kev6168]

This seems to be Alibaba's github page. https://github.com/alibaba

Among the projects Tengine is the powerful web server (based on Nginx) used at Tmall.com and Taobao.com.

[jamra]

That's pretty cool. They implemented sticky sessions for Nginx .

[samstave]

Was looking at Tengine as well, it seems pretty awesome. Anyone use it in production (that is not Alibaba?) and have comments on it?

[Igglyboo]

I wonder if Amazon is worried.

[adventured]

Google perhaps should be more worried than Amazon.

Alibaba is an advertising company, not a retailer.

[innguest]

They should be. Amazon makes no profits and operates in dollars. Those are two things you don't want to get caught doing right now.

[tszming]

You can get an authenticated Gap's Shirt (from their official tmall) for around $15-20 USD (after discount/coupons, currently $40-50 on gap.com), so the deal is not bad even you compare with the coming US holidays discounts.

[merrua]

The aliexpress sales are really good this year. Around 40% of users on mobile https://twitter.com/Alizila

[joelthelion]

I wonder to which extent these predictions are willingly underestimated in order to make the headlines?

[foobarqux]

Were there any good deals for Westerners?

[icebraining]

Aliexpress has plenty of stuff today with 50-90% discount. Like an MP3 player for $1.6 - with free shipping!

[tsax]

I bought a couple winter coats from them. BEWARE of the size, as obvious as it sounds, but I can often wear Medium or even Small sized clothes at H&M and Zara, so I picked 'Large' on Aliexpress and I swear it would be an Extra-Extra-Small here in the US.