On 11th of November, while you were sound asleep, the world purchased ¥100 billion worth of products from Alibaba’s platforms in exactly 1 hour 47 minutes and 26 seconds. That’s a whopping $14.36 billion USD or 334,728,620,416,530 VND.

The 24-hour event ended with sales totalling $30.8 billion USD,  bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. The event also far surpassed Amazon’s Prime Day.

Singles’ Day or Guānggùn Jié (Chinese: 光棍节) is the largest shopping event in the world. In less than a decade, Alibaba Group’s billionaire Jack Ma has organized an odd celebration for unmarried young people in China into a global trend for thousands of retailers. Hundreds of millions of shoppers of all ages.

Here in Vietnam, 11.11 Singles Day has not caught on to be such an explosive event. Some might say, it is different here in Vietnam. But as a retail business, can you afford to ignore such a global phenomenon? The exponential year-on-year growth should give you a hint.

Alibaba 11.11 Singles' Day GMV

 

Double 11 is now an international event. The top countries selling to China were Japan, United States, South Korea, Australia and Germany. More than 40% of purchases were from international brands. See the statistics here.

For the first time, Lazada hosted its 11.11 Shopping Festival across six countries in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, offering more engaged consumer experience and the biggest discounts of the year from LazMall and Lazada marketplace.

You might say, I’m a small retailer, I’m not an international brand.

Our team at Whitebox made several purchases during the event – different products from random sellers on Aliexpress.

Here is one of the messages we received, a few minutes after we paid for our purchases.

The seller was not Xiaomi, the official brand shop itself. But from a small retailer that sold its products. And this seller anticipated 50,000 – 60,000 orders over this 1-day event, to such extent that they prepared such a notification for their customers.

This seller could be you, and your business can benefit from a surge in sales.

If you have missed out on 11.11 Singles’ Day, the sequel to that is 12.12 held on the 12th of December. The concept behind Double 12, according to Alibaba, is to profile small and medium-sized brands that may have been trampled by larger businesses on Singles Day.

It is time to get busy, and ramp up for December sales.

A surge in sales can also mean disappointed customers waiting to receive their orders. An experienced and reliable fulfilment vendor like Whitebox ensures your new customer, will be a repeat customer.