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Alibaba's Singles' Day sales surge 60 percent to $14.3B
- epa 11y agoAlthough I have enjoyed watching Jack Ma's journey with Alibaba, I am very skeptical of any self reported numbers coming out of Chinese markets. While i believe they have enourmous volume flowing through their services, you can never be sure how much of this is being accurately reported.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chaostheory 11y agoI'm also skeptical since Alibaba has a history of accounting fraud.
- qiqing 11y ago> I am very skeptical of any self reported numbers coming out of Chinese markets Would you say that you are less skeptical of large U.S.-based companies (banks, energy, or any other sector) when self-reporting?
- epa 11y agoI would say there is a greater risk of incorrect self reporting to US public companies than Chinese public companies.
- gojomo 11y agoWhy didn't Amazon think of this? If synthesizing such a 'holiday' for the US, my guess is that a date in June might work best.
- swamp40 11y agoYou forgot about "Amazon Prime Day", July 15...
- askafriend 11y agoThat was an amazing time to be on Twitter. I'm excited for the next one specifically for this reason. So. Many. Jokes.
- gregshap 11y agoOr you put it in late november and call it "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday"
- surferbayarea 11y agoBlack Friday is a baby in comparison - just $1.35b
- gregshap 11y agoThe article had 1.35b as an estimate for cyber monday online sales. Black friday is a lot bigger overall - on the order of 50 billion for the weekend. Of course in the US there is no single retailer capturing such a huge share of the sales on our invented holidays. But cmon, we pretty much invented the inventing of consumer holidays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Retail_sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Retail...
- gojomo 11y agoToo close to Christmas to be spun as "buy something for yourself" day.
- dghughes 11y agoForever Alone Day™ Maybe on February 13th? Or to be cruel Feb 29th.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoI had a Chinese teacher who told us that March 14th was White Valentine's Day, when valentine's gifts are reciprocated. A month after that, on April 14th, you have Black Valentine's Day. Those holidays are known to wikipedia, although it attributes "White Day" primarily to Japan and "Black Day" exclusively to Korea. So the opposite of Valentine's Day is already placed; April 14th. I don't see why Western Forever Alone Day would need to be scheduled differently from Chinese Forever Alone Day -- the date was picked for being all ones. (And, I'm told, you can celebrate by eating 1-shaped Pocky.)
- svenfaw 11y agoWow, my network monitor and firewall just went crazy on that page. Does it really need to open more than 190 separate HTTP connections for a simple news article (many of them to shady domains)? This is downright ridiculous. Edit: Re-installing an ad blocker to preserve my sanity.
- ww520 11y agoThese news pages have dozens of tracker. All those phone home. Ghostery to the rescue. Block all of them. Edit: I've just turned off Ghostery and AdBlocker. Ghostery reports that page has at least 39 trackers.
- mring33621 11y ago14 billion HTTP connections!
- dang 11y agoWhich of the recent URLs is the best? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=alibaba%20singles&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=alibaba%20singles&sort=byDate&... (One thing we want to make the HN software do is let users the link related URLs together and identify the best one of a set.)
- svenfaw 11y agoBased on a very quick check, these two fare much better: https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-crushes-records-brings-143-billion-singles-day/ https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-crushes-records-brings-14... http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940
- dang 11y agoThey may be easier to load, but which has the best content? That's always the #1 concern here. We've changed to the BBC url for now. Previously http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/11/us-alibaba-singles-day-idUSKCN0SZ34J20151111#H3OPU2xoksD5hTyq.97 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/11/us-alibaba-singles....
- nieksand 11y agoGood post pointing out probable hanky panky behind these claims: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-interview-questions-size-and-scope.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-interview-ques...
- ericabiz 11y agoThe guy who wrote this post literally has no idea what he's talking about. He makes two completely faulty assumptions: 1) Only Chinese people buy from Alibaba. I co-own a retail store here in the US and we order a lot of stuff from Aliexpress. We are a Gold VIP on Aliexpress ($4,000 in sales every 90 days to maintain this level; we do about $1.5-2K/month average on there.) If you read the reviews of products on Aliexpress, you'll see reviews in just about every language--English, French, Russian, etc. In fact, very few of the reviews are from Chinese customers. Ali is most definitely a platform (two different platforms, actually, with Aliexpress and Alibaba) for China to sell to the rest of the world. Not necessarily for China to sell to China. 2) They'd need some sort of huge fulfillment centers a la Amazon. The genius of the Aliexpress business model is that it works like eBay (Alibaba I'd more likely compare to LinkedIn, as it's even less centralized.) Sellers fulfill orders themselves, post tracking numbers, and live chat/message with buyers to complete the loop. Some sellers take Alipay, which is the Paypal to Aliexpress's eBay. Others take Paypal, wire transfers, etc. There is absolutely no gigantic warehouse needed by Alibaba. All of these assumptions that he guessed so wrong on could have easily been disproven by ordering a few $2 items off Aliexpress and having them shipped to his house to see how the business model works. It's pretty straightforward!
- brazzledazzle 11y agoDo countries other than China celebrate singles day?
- GrandTheftR 11y agoIf the price is good, I would assume customers will jump in and buy, they may even schedule their buy to align with this day, to celebrate this day or not doesn't matter imho.
- ChrisArchitect 11y agoa terrifying number, hard to fathom really. Unbridled seemingly mindless consumption
- justicezyx 11y ago11/11 single's day, the poor dogs without a companion... Craving for social interactions so much that have to buy something over taobao...
- bigtunacan 11y agoAnd yet still Alibaba's share price fell nearly another 2% today. :(
- bigtunacan 11y agoWhy was this down voted? Not trolling; shares of Alibaba ended down 1.99% today at $79.81 a share. This seems counterintuitive. Since they smashed sales records I would have expected to see a bump in the shares at least today even if didn't translate to the long term.
- sdrothrock 11y agoI heard about this a few days ago and went for it, but my payment couldn't be processed. Got an e-mail this morning telling me that because of the high volume of sales, they had some payments failing and that I should try again... didn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence in me as a first-time buyer.
- desireco42 11y agoI didn't go crazy but I bought a ton of stuff on aliexpress. I buy regularily, and I saved few items to buy today. This is huge and genuinely global event.
- xoai 11y agoDoes anyone know the cancel/return rate?