Online sales bonanza reaped from Singles’ Day shopping

In the first 12 hours of Sunday, Alibaba Group's online sales volume reached 8 billion yuan ($1.28 billion), more than the total online sales volume in the US last year on Cyber Monday, a post-Thanksgiving day when companies offer a range of discounts and promotions.

The main reason for the massive sales was the numerous Singles' Day promotions on offer by Tmall, Alibaba's B2C subsidiary. November 11 has come to be known as Singles' Day in China, due to the four "1"s in the date of 11/11.

As well as being a day for young people to celebrate their single status or find love, it has become a lucrative sales opportunity for domestic e-commerce platforms, like Tmall, 360buy.com and suning.com.

Tmall, an online trading platform, began its sales promotions at the beginning of Sunday, offering products ranging from baby diapers to fridges with discounts of as much as 50 percent.

During the first minute after the promotion started, more than 10 million shoppers were using the platform, compared to last year's 3.42 million, according to data posted by Tmall on its Weibo account Sunday.

At 2:19 am, the company's sales volume reached 3.37 billion yuan, higher than that of the entire day in 2011, and by 1:38 pm the number reached 10 billion yuan, according to Tmall.

Unlike Tmall's half-price promotion, other domestic platforms such as suning.com preferred to offer cash coupons.

Suning.com's sales promotion, which lasted for three days from November 9 to 11, was expected to bring the company over 20 times more orders than last year, after 1.5 million orders were made during the first two days, Li Bin, deputy CEO of suning.com, said Sunday.

360buy.com could not be contacted by press time.

Data released earlier by consultancy iResearch showed that suning.com had a 4.2 percent share of the domestic B2C e-commerce market in the third quarter of 2012, ranking fourth. Tencent's online platform buy.qq.com ranked third with a 4.5 percent share; 360buy.com was second with 21.8 percent and Tmall was first with 54.6 percent.

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