The shopping extravaganza — China’s version of Black Friday and Amazon’s Prime Day — will test logistics networks and retail innovations.
Singles Day — the frenzied annual celebration of consumption and commerce that is China’s much larger version of Black Friday — began as a protest of sorts against Valentine’s Day, propelled by college students in the 1990s.
The event’s date, written numerically as 11/11, was associated with unattached singles, known as “bare sticks.”
This year’s shopping festival entered new territory, blazing past $1 billion within two minutes of the holiday, starting at midnight on Saturday.
Singles Day is now inextricably linked with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce leviathan that in recent years has turned the holiday into an online — and occasionally brick-and-mortar — mercantile extravaganza. It routinely eclipses Amazon’s yearly Prime Day promotional event.
In July, Prime Day generated an estimated $1 billion in revenue during its 30-hour sale window, resulting in what Amazon called its “biggest day ever.
