HANGZHOU, Nov. 13 -- China's major online shopping platforms shattered records during China's Singles' Day shopping spree.

Alibaba said the Singles' Day sales on its online shopping platforms reached a record 268.4 billion yuan (about 38.3 billion U.S. dollars), marking a year-on-year growth of about 25.7 percent. JD.com hit 204.4 billion yuan from Nov. 1 to 11 and Suning's order volume in the first hour after midnight increased by 89 percent year on year.

EVER-GROWING DEMANDS

Nov. 11 is known in China as Singles' Day because the date, 11-11, resembles four "bare sticks," a term used in China to refer to single people. The day became associated with online shopping with an Alibaba promotional campaign in 2009.

"Double 11" shopping spree is just like a window into China's great potentials in domestic demand, Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong said.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, China's internet availability rate reached 61.2 percent, with mobile phone users accounting for over 99 percent of the total netizens. Faster Internet service at lower costs empowers more and more Chinese consumers using online platforms to buy whatever they want.

With easier access to the Internet, logistics and transportation, online business is no stranger to Chinese rural areas, which are huge potential markets.

Statistics show that more than 70 percent of Tmall's new consumers come from lower-tier cities. JD.com said the number of its consumers in lower-tier cities increased by over 60 percent from last year.

Rural e-commerce is now connecting rural farmyards with urban dining tables, benefiting both farmers and urban consumers.

Moreover, China's strong domestic demands also send out positive signals to the global market. Compared with only 27 brands in 2009, Alibaba platforms attracted more than 22,000 overseas brands from over 200 countries and regions in this year's shopping spree.

"In the past three years, our total sales kept growing at an amazing speed. We are happy that Chinese consumers like our products and we hope our company can introduce more high-quality products to the Chinese market," said Zong Yanping, managing director of DeLonghi China, an Italian coffee maker brand.

UPGRADING TECHNOLOGY

According to Alibaba, the "Double 11" orders on Tmall peaked at 544,000 per second, setting a new record for peak online traffic in the world, which is 1,360 times more than that of 2009.

Thanks to Alibaba's domestically developed cloud computing system, the online shopping platforms successfully sustain thousands of users flooding in within seconds.

On Singles' Day, 500 million consumers generated nearly 1.3 billion parcels on Alibaba's e-commerce platforms, which tests the country's logistics capabilities.

Advanced logistics technology is speeding up the delivery of packages globally.

The total length of automated sorting lines in China's express industry has exceeded 5,000 km as of this year's Double 11, surveys made by Alibaba's logistics arm Cainiao Network showed.

YTO Express has enabled more automated equipment in the first half of 2019, almost doubling its historical sum. To make quicker transfers, YTO installed five automated machines in its Guangzhou logistics center in southern China, which can scan 1,800 waybills per hour.

Facial recognition, QR code, AI voice assistants and various robots have also been used to offer quicker and smarter delivery services for consumers.