Consumers spent more than 120 billion yuan (17.6 billion U.S. dollars) Friday shopping online on leading e-commerce platform Alibaba in their annual buying spree, sources with Alibaba Group said Saturday.
Online transactions totaled 120.748 billion yuan in the 24 hours that ended as the clocks struck 12 p.m. Friday, a record amount in global retail for any single day, according to data provided by Alibaba.
The shopping spree hit a climactic high just nine minutes after midnight on Friday morning, with an average 120,000 transactions handled per second on Alipay, Alibaba's mobile payment platform, 1.4 times as many as last year.
In addition, 54,000 payments were made every second through the wireless service for debit cards, according to Ant Financial, which runs Alipay.
Alipay handled a total of 1.05 billion payments Friday, a surge of 48 percent year-on-year. Altogether 657 million delivery orders were handled by cainiao.com, Alibaba's delivery service platform, in the 24-hour shopping event, up 40.7 percent from last year.
More than 200 countries and regions were involved in the shopping spree, and 47 million consumers ordered products by international brands, said Zhang Yong, Alibaba's CEO.
The shopping spree on Singles' Day, which is named for the repeated digit 1 in the date Nov. 11, was created by Alibaba in 2009.
The annual event has been a test and rehearsal of China's new retail technology, market operation and business patterns, said Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group.
New retail patterns are created when online and offline sales, logistics services, technology and marketing data make a perfect match, said Ma.
"This, in the meantime, upgrades the supply chain and promotes supply-side reform." According to Alibaba Group, consumers in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Guangzhou spent more on Singles' Day than those in other Chinese cities.
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