Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com laughed all the way to the bank on Wednesday, Nov. 11, as sales records were broken as unattached people celebrated Single's Day.
Techcrunch reports that the largest online shopping day, which dwarfs Black Friday sales in the U.S., had virtual cash registers crying "kaching" as Alibaba had beaten its 2014 record by matching the record $9.2 billion sales by 12:30 p.m. An hour earlier, JD.com exceeded the 14 million orders it received in 2014.
BBC reports that by close of trading day, Alibaba's sales hit $14.3 billion.
In comparison, the 2014 Black Friday sales in the U.S. totaled only $1.5 billion, while Cyber Monday sales was a lower $1.35 billion, according to data from ComScore, an analytics company.
Apparently, China's one-child policy, which Beijing just lifted in late October, worked to the online sellers' advantage because the policy led to a gender imbalance that millions of male Chinese lack opportunities to have potential lifetime partners, resulting in a large number of singles, who rather than sulk at their situation, pamper and buy gifts for themselves online.
That explains why year-on-year sales of Alibaba and JD.com keeps on jumping from $5.75 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion in 2014 for Alibaba and 120 percent hike in orders for JD.com for the same years.
Online sellers capitalized on the 11/11 numbers of Single's Day in China to convince Chinese it is a special day for freeing their cash from their wallets or credit cards. Since the same day was the Diwali festival in India, e-commerce operators such as Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal took advantage by waging a big sales campaign in the other Asian giant with millions of potential buyers.