11 ms·

Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

247 points by fmihaila 10y ago

rickhackworld 10y ago
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kogepathic 10y ago
> and a weakening yuan may curb enthusiasm for foreign wares. I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)
- nicolas_t 10y ago
  Alibaba also includes taobao and taobao mall which do sell foreign brands. It's not just Aliexpress...
- laurentdc 10y ago
  > Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.
  - tsunamifury 10y ago
    As someone who has visited the factories of Brunello Cucinelli, Kiton, and Zenga -- that is patently untrue. I saw mostly skilled craftsmen doing handwork. So either you are making this up or you definition of "highest" isn't quite on the mark.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    This is an extraordinary claim, can you back this up in some way? I'm not from Italy or France so it isn't common knowledge to me.
    - laurentdc 10y ago
      Gucci, Prada, Moncler at least. This kind of stuff was covered by the national TV for a while but no one seems to care anymore. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly20 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly... http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-the-chinese-workers http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-... http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prada-moncler-il-tempo-dello-sfruttamento-e-la-sostanza-del-valore/ http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prad... (couldn't find an english version of this one, sorry) "Sold to Gucci for €24 euros each (around $28.09) despite a retail rate of $1000, Aroldo Guidotti of the subcontractor, leather goods specialist Mondo Libero, was filmed discussing the cost saving strategy of replacing Italian workers with Chinese nationals, who are hired as part-time employees, and yet work more hours than those on a full-time contract."
      - linkregister 10y ago
        Thanks for delivering! I'm surprised this hasn't diminished the allure of Gucci et. al.
      - tsunamifury 10y ago
        Gucci, Prada, and Moncler are at best "middle tier luxury" brands. Almost everyone knows they are completely/partially made in China.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Many things are made in what China calls "Special Export Zones" (SEZs). This is for goods that require lots of imported machinery and components to make, which are basically brought into the zones duty free. But as a consequence, what is made in these zones can only be exported. So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Besides, the iPhone is < 10% Chinese (final assembly), a lot of the components are coming from ROK, Japan, Taiwan, and of course the IP is all American. For clothes, the amount that foreign companies is paying on material and labor was already ridiculously low, and they still pay for their other costs in dollars (or rather, not yuan) so....
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I seem to recall that before HK was turned over to China, HK companies would do all but the most final of assemblies in China and then ship it across the border so they could be sold as "made in Hong Kong". And this is how Shenzen go so massive, as it is right up stream from HK.
    - baybal2 10y ago
      And Singapore as well before they turned from a city state to a city offshore bank. They exploited their WTO membership. Most of operations were ran like that: company imports loose goods from China at few pennies, and puts in "value" into them, most of the times just packaging with writing in English that was supposed to "cost" few dollars each, but of course the packaging was made in China for less than a penny each. This also allowed the Sg intermediary to claim expense on the stuff, reducing effective tax to single digits. Those were golden times.
- Cerium 10y ago
  Foreign goods are extremely popular on Tmall and Taobao. There are companies that specialize in shipping containers full of Costco Kirkland goods to China, and usually selling them for a good markup. For example: Ferrero Rocher chocolate boxes can be bought at Costco for between 9 and 13 dollars. They sell in China for 200-250 RMB (thats about 30 USD). One of my wife's friends is a Chinese citizen who lives in Italy. She selects purses, backpacks, and occasionally wine and markets them in China. There is a lot of demand for showing up your friends with expensive imported goods. Even more benefit if you had to use a connection to purchase the goods.
KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
I heard that last year some pre orders were counted towards the singles' day tally. Is that accounted for?
- nostromo 10y ago
  That's addressed in the last three paragraphs of the article.
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive. I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival). On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
- wcummings 10y ago
  I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap microcontrollers and what not.
  - fapjacks 10y ago
    YES!! You can buy just an egregious amount of (crappy) components for very little money. As a wannabe-inventor that burns through a lot of components, this is really one of my favorite things about it.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      It's great for amateur electronics projects. Need 100 22AWG five-strand connectors and you're not in a rush? Hit up AliExpress, and they'll show up on your doorstep for less than the price of a frozen pizza in a few weeks.
  - 50CNT 10y ago
    Just as an example what taobao is so neat for, Temperature Controlled Outlet 33.3 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.t80P3i&id=536295296729&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3200881016743 Water Heater 19.9 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.MjQ88E&id=527717128601&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3219050495205 Aquarium Wave Maker 15.9 RMB https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.47.Wgm0TD&id=533814521124&ns=1&abbucket=4#detail 50 L Plastic Box 35.0 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.haJnJy&id=530500415822&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&sku_properties=21433:648878820 Which, if i manage to get it working, makes a sous vide circulator (i hope). Also have a small hydroponics setup in an orgfile somewhere, which comes to about 150RMB.
andr 10y ago
This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.
- hueving 10y ago
  What? $1B over a day vs $1B over a year is the same with regard to 99.999%. If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
  - monatron 10y ago
    I think his point is if you're making $1B a day vs $1B in a year downtime suddenly becomes much more costly for you
  - iamthepieman 10y ago
    .001 of a years worth of minutes is 525 minutes (.001 * 525600) or about 8 hours and 40 minutes. If all of that time just so happened to occur on the $1B day then that's 356 million. Of course this is back of the napkin. That $1B is not evenly distributed throughout the day and especially in high availability systems the .001 downtime is many small outages over the entire infrastructure and not the entire apparatus crashing all at once. Though because load can be a factor in downtime, they are not completely without correlation.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      On mobile but didn't you leave off the percentage sign? (which is another two zeros after the dot) Of course this is taking op very literally EDIT: I checked: google "0.001% * 1 year" and it tells you 5.259 minutes, so you were off due to dropping the % sign. That changes things dramatically: beyond the 100x difference, there is very high likelihood that someone would check back 2 minutes later (especially if they are waiting all year), so 5 minutes of downtime (spread over a whole day) likely objectively results in much lower lost sales than your calculation implied! For future envelope calculations don't forget that a % sign is exactly moving the decimal two more places! 55.2% is exactly .552 and so forth!
Hanks10100 10y ago
They are using weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex
- dndyh 10y ago
  very good!!!
- KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
  I know weex is being worked on by alibaba but is it actually confirmed that the live app is using this?
  - Hanks10100 10y ago
    Yes, I confirmed that.
- m1 10y ago
  Is their actual app using weex though?
  - Hanks10100 10y ago
    Alibaba's TaoBao and TMall are using it actually.
MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
Some background info: I'm tech lead for a german shop on tmall.hk, and indeed this time, the numbers are crazy. What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals. The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it. On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
- NKCSS 10y ago
  Just curious; why would a german webshop have hong kong tld?
  - wodenokoto 10y ago
    tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.
    - skinnymuch 10y ago
      Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld. Unless I'm missing something.
      - alaskamiller 10y ago
        tmall.hk is Taobao, OP is saying he manages IT for an account based in Germany on tmall.hk
        skinnymuch 10y ago
        Ah yeah that's what I missed. Thanks
brandur 10y ago
An article on how Alibaba subsidiaries are using a backend stack based on Spring: https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/ https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib... The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]). I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale. [1] https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/ https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib... [2] https://github.com/alibaba https://github.com/alibaba
- Hanks10100 10y ago
  Weex is one of those technologies. It was running on TaoBao app actually. https://github.com/alibaba/weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex
- Hanks10100 10y ago
  Weex is a framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI. https://alibaba.github.io/weex https://alibaba.github.io/weex
marban 10y ago
"Alibaba, Amid Intense Hype, Confronts a Slowdown on Singles Day" http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/alibaba-singles-day-slowdown.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/ali...
wenbin 10y ago
Check out Alibaba's 2012 tech stack & how they prepared for 11.11 :) https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-tmall https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-tmall
baybal2 10y ago
Ma tried to get to the West with B2C really really hard, but only got burned with the 10 Main fad store, a wasted office lease, and around $100m. wasted on online ads alone. Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent zero on ads.
jandrese 10y ago
I wonder how they avoid getting DDOSed to hell and back during their big sale week? You would think the DDOS extortion groups would be all over that.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  All of China hitting your servers aren't considered a DDOS by itself?
  - nsomaru 10y ago
    Not sure it's called DoS when the traffic is legitimate
    - striking 10y ago
      Yeah, there's no Denial of Service there. Just service.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        There might be a DOS but it's not an attack. It's easier to leave off the the "attack" in "DDOS attack" so it's implied but without it the meaning changes.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    If they're buying stuff then it's not a DDOS. If it's millions of garbage IoT devices hitting your servers and running whatever the most expensive (CPU/Memory/IO wise) queries constantly then yes, that's a DDOS. The DDOS extortion guys are getting really good at their job. They even broke Akamai a few weeks ago. It's a spiral where they extort money and use it to improve their infrastructure to be able to extort bigger and bigger players. I have zero doubt that Alibabba's servers were already straining under the load of that many shoppers. Adding a DDOS on top of that would be catastrophic.
danvoell 10y ago
If I go to the site aliexpress.com it looks like the deals don't start for another 12 hours. Are there different launch times for the sales?
- hawkice 10y ago
  Singles' Day is Nov 11 (11/11), so I'm guessing you're in Pacific time zone? The big splash was when the sale started in China, which is quite a few hours ahead of the US.
- capnjngl 10y ago
  It's 11/11 in parts of Asia already.
- Hanks10100 10y ago
  There sales is on the www.taobao.com and www.tmall.com
madmax108 10y ago
I work at a young company providing search as a service for multiple medium/big e-commerce sites (mostly those which don't have their own search teams) and 11/11 is indeed a crazy day. It's funny how till 2 years ago, Cyber Monday was the big event we looked at and we noticed major traffic spikes last year on veteran's day (11/11) only to later realize that this was in fact singles' day! This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected again! :)
Steeeve 10y ago
Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.
- drifting 10y ago
  If it's small and sent by ePacket (assuming you are in the US), then it will arrive fairly quickly
- alaskamiller 10y ago
  Aliexpress is US-based sellers with US-based warehousing so you get it directly in the US. The better deals are on alibaba outright for Chinese consumers.
  - OrdaGarb 10y ago
    Of my 140 orders over the last two years on Aliexpress, only one has been originated in the US (California, to be exact). All but a few of the remainder were from China. I reside in Colorado. Mostly I buy hobby electronic components, chemicals/substances, and the occasional household or automotive item. I've used Alibaba.com as well, but the payment methods are far different and it's a more risky situation with fewer guarantees. That service I use for high-value orders after a thorough vetting of the seller. Mostly commodity items like a pallet of green coffee beans, or weird chemicals in unusual quantities. Sometimes an order on Aliexpress will be large enough that I must consider negotiating with someone on Alibaba.com instead. Negotiations happen for me on Aliexpress as well, but the sellers on Alibaba.com seem to have greater latitude in not only price, but also packing, shipping, and handling to destination.
- jpablo 10y ago
  It has a huge timer in the front page stating that the deals starts in about 11 hours from now.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gigatexal 10y ago
Isn't there an ongoing concern that a lot of what is sold on alibaba is counterfeit?
hncommenter13 10y ago
Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github here[1] and here[2]. There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software. Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail. [1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase [2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5 https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5 [3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.) I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7_2 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form. There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase
zoom6628 10y ago
I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled. I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids. Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.
- pvlbdn 10y ago
  Exactly my story last night. 9 out of 10 transactions failed.
tonosari 10y ago
It's the new Black Friday in China
richardhawthorn 10y ago
It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly the price I was seeing last week. I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying. Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.
pman2000 10y ago
These numbers are absolutely sick... I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!
ensiferum 10y ago
sigh and all that plastic crap just ends up in the landfill (ocean) half a year later. Instead we should have a "buy nothing day" that'd get celebrated for its 0$ sales.
rasz_pl 10y ago
1 Aliexpress thinks Im in russia 2 Aliexpress.com tries to make tons of UDP connections, WebRTC? (unable to disable in desktop chrome)
adgulacti 10y ago
retail type of bullshit, literally. stuffing all the sale into a single day when none of the physical or non-physical systems are designed or implemented to meet such peak demand. my current company does everything to eliminate such peaks, which makes sense considering customer satisfaction (service quality) and cost efficiency, and some guys like alibaba doing the opposite. nothing but marketing scam, prices getting bloated in the day before and discounts(?) exclusive to 11.11.

247 points by fmihaila 10y ago

A team consisting of highly efficient developers and hackers. Upgrade University Grades Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, Line, Skype Hack Delete unwanted online Pictures and Videos on any website Remove Criminal Records Hack bank accounts Apps hacking MasterCard, Paypal, Bitcoin, WU, Money Gram with untraceable credit on it etc. We also develop hacked facebook, twitter, instagram, yahoo, gmail passwords etc. We do custom software and web development in php, java, asp.net etc...... We have 100% records from our client as well as highest repeat hire rate. *We provide a perfect software solution to all clients. We believe in mutual growing with client and hence we work as a technology partner and consultant for our clients. Contact us via email (rickbosshacker @yahoo .com)

kogepathic 10y ago

> and a weakening yuan may curb enthusiasm for foreign wares. I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)

nicolas_t 10y ago
Alibaba also includes taobao and taobao mall which do sell foreign brands. It's not just Aliexpress...
laurentdc 10y ago
> Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  As someone who has visited the factories of Brunello Cucinelli, Kiton, and Zenga -- that is patently untrue. I saw mostly skilled craftsmen doing handwork. So either you are making this up or you definition of "highest" isn't quite on the mark.
- linkregister 10y ago
  This is an extraordinary claim, can you back this up in some way? I'm not from Italy or France so it isn't common knowledge to me.
  - laurentdc 10y ago
    Gucci, Prada, Moncler at least. This kind of stuff was covered by the national TV for a while but no one seems to care anymore. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly20 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly... http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-the-chinese-workers http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-... http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prada-moncler-il-tempo-dello-sfruttamento-e-la-sostanza-del-valore/ http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prad... (couldn't find an english version of this one, sorry) "Sold to Gucci for €24 euros each (around $28.09) despite a retail rate of $1000, Aroldo Guidotti of the subcontractor, leather goods specialist Mondo Libero, was filmed discussing the cost saving strategy of replacing Italian workers with Chinese nationals, who are hired as part-time employees, and yet work more hours than those on a full-time contract."
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Thanks for delivering! I'm surprised this hasn't diminished the allure of Gucci et. al.
    - tsunamifury 10y ago
      Gucci, Prada, and Moncler are at best "middle tier luxury" brands. Almost everyone knows they are completely/partially made in China.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Many things are made in what China calls "Special Export Zones" (SEZs). This is for goods that require lots of imported machinery and components to make, which are basically brought into the zones duty free. But as a consequence, what is made in these zones can only be exported. So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Besides, the iPhone is < 10% Chinese (final assembly), a lot of the components are coming from ROK, Japan, Taiwan, and of course the IP is all American. For clothes, the amount that foreign companies is paying on material and labor was already ridiculously low, and they still pay for their other costs in dollars (or rather, not yuan) so....
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I seem to recall that before HK was turned over to China, HK companies would do all but the most final of assemblies in China and then ship it across the border so they could be sold as "made in Hong Kong". And this is how Shenzen go so massive, as it is right up stream from HK.
  - baybal2 10y ago
    And Singapore as well before they turned from a city state to a city offshore bank. They exploited their WTO membership. Most of operations were ran like that: company imports loose goods from China at few pennies, and puts in "value" into them, most of the times just packaging with writing in English that was supposed to "cost" few dollars each, but of course the packaging was made in China for less than a penny each. This also allowed the Sg intermediary to claim expense on the stuff, reducing effective tax to single digits. Those were golden times.
Cerium 10y ago
Foreign goods are extremely popular on Tmall and Taobao. There are companies that specialize in shipping containers full of Costco Kirkland goods to China, and usually selling them for a good markup. For example: Ferrero Rocher chocolate boxes can be bought at Costco for between 9 and 13 dollars. They sell in China for 200-250 RMB (thats about 30 USD). One of my wife's friends is a Chinese citizen who lives in Italy. She selects purses, backpacks, and occasionally wine and markets them in China. There is a lot of demand for showing up your friends with expensive imported goods. Even more benefit if you had to use a connection to purchase the goods.

KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago

I heard that last year some pre orders were counted towards the singles' day tally. Is that accounted for?

nostromo 10y ago
That's addressed in the last three paragraphs of the article.

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive. I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival). On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).

wcummings 10y ago
I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap microcontrollers and what not.
- fapjacks 10y ago
  YES!! You can buy just an egregious amount of (crappy) components for very little money. As a wannabe-inventor that burns through a lot of components, this is really one of my favorite things about it.
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    It's great for amateur electronics projects. Need 100 22AWG five-strand connectors and you're not in a rush? Hit up AliExpress, and they'll show up on your doorstep for less than the price of a frozen pizza in a few weeks.
- 50CNT 10y ago
  Just as an example what taobao is so neat for, Temperature Controlled Outlet 33.3 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.t80P3i&id=536295296729&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3200881016743 Water Heater 19.9 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.MjQ88E&id=527717128601&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3219050495205 Aquarium Wave Maker 15.9 RMB https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.47.Wgm0TD&id=533814521124&ns=1&abbucket=4#detail 50 L Plastic Box 35.0 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.haJnJy&id=530500415822&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&sku_properties=21433:648878820 Which, if i manage to get it working, makes a sous vide circulator (i hope). Also have a small hydroponics setup in an orgfile somewhere, which comes to about 150RMB.

andr 10y ago

This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.

hueving 10y ago
What? $1B over a day vs $1B over a year is the same with regard to 99.999%. If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
- monatron 10y ago
  I think his point is if you're making $1B a day vs $1B in a year downtime suddenly becomes much more costly for you
- iamthepieman 10y ago
  .001 of a years worth of minutes is 525 minutes (.001 * 525600) or about 8 hours and 40 minutes. If all of that time just so happened to occur on the $1B day then that's 356 million. Of course this is back of the napkin. That $1B is not evenly distributed throughout the day and especially in high availability systems the .001 downtime is many small outages over the entire infrastructure and not the entire apparatus crashing all at once. Though because load can be a factor in downtime, they are not completely without correlation.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    On mobile but didn't you leave off the percentage sign? (which is another two zeros after the dot) Of course this is taking op very literally EDIT: I checked: google "0.001% * 1 year" and it tells you 5.259 minutes, so you were off due to dropping the % sign. That changes things dramatically: beyond the 100x difference, there is very high likelihood that someone would check back 2 minutes later (especially if they are waiting all year), so 5 minutes of downtime (spread over a whole day) likely objectively results in much lower lost sales than your calculation implied! For future envelope calculations don't forget that a % sign is exactly moving the decimal two more places! 55.2% is exactly .552 and so forth!

Hanks10100 10y ago

They are using weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex

dndyh 10y ago
very good!!!
KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
I know weex is being worked on by alibaba but is it actually confirmed that the live app is using this?
- Hanks10100 10y ago
  Yes, I confirmed that.
m1 10y ago
Is their actual app using weex though?
- Hanks10100 10y ago
  Alibaba's TaoBao and TMall are using it actually.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago

Some background info: I'm tech lead for a german shop on tmall.hk, and indeed this time, the numbers are crazy. What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals. The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it. On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.

NKCSS 10y ago
Just curious; why would a german webshop have hong kong tld?
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.
  - skinnymuch 10y ago
    Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld. Unless I'm missing something.
    - alaskamiller 10y ago
      tmall.hk is Taobao, OP is saying he manages IT for an account based in Germany on tmall.hk
      - skinnymuch 10y ago
        Ah yeah that's what I missed. Thanks

brandur 10y ago

An article on how Alibaba subsidiaries are using a backend stack based on Spring: https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/ https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib... The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]). I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale. [1] https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/ https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib... [2] https://github.com/alibaba https://github.com/alibaba

Hanks10100 10y ago
Weex is one of those technologies. It was running on TaoBao app actually. https://github.com/alibaba/weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex
Hanks10100 10y ago
Weex is a framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI. https://alibaba.github.io/weex https://alibaba.github.io/weex

marban 10y ago

"Alibaba, Amid Intense Hype, Confronts a Slowdown on Singles Day" http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/alibaba-singles-day-slowdown.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/ali...

wenbin 10y ago

Check out Alibaba's 2012 tech stack & how they prepared for 11.11 :) https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-tmall https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-tmall

baybal2 10y ago

Ma tried to get to the West with B2C really really hard, but only got burned with the 10 Main fad store, a wasted office lease, and around $100m. wasted on online ads alone. Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent zero on ads.

jandrese 10y ago

I wonder how they avoid getting DDOSed to hell and back during their big sale week? You would think the DDOS extortion groups would be all over that.

ngokevin 10y ago
All of China hitting your servers aren't considered a DDOS by itself?
- nsomaru 10y ago
  Not sure it's called DoS when the traffic is legitimate
  - striking 10y ago
    Yeah, there's no Denial of Service there. Just service.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      There might be a DOS but it's not an attack. It's easier to leave off the the "attack" in "DDOS attack" so it's implied but without it the meaning changes.
- jandrese 10y ago
  If they're buying stuff then it's not a DDOS. If it's millions of garbage IoT devices hitting your servers and running whatever the most expensive (CPU/Memory/IO wise) queries constantly then yes, that's a DDOS. The DDOS extortion guys are getting really good at their job. They even broke Akamai a few weeks ago. It's a spiral where they extort money and use it to improve their infrastructure to be able to extort bigger and bigger players. I have zero doubt that Alibabba's servers were already straining under the load of that many shoppers. Adding a DDOS on top of that would be catastrophic.

danvoell 10y ago

If I go to the site aliexpress.com it looks like the deals don't start for another 12 hours. Are there different launch times for the sales?

hawkice 10y ago
Singles' Day is Nov 11 (11/11), so I'm guessing you're in Pacific time zone? The big splash was when the sale started in China, which is quite a few hours ahead of the US.
capnjngl 10y ago
It's 11/11 in parts of Asia already.
Hanks10100 10y ago
There sales is on the www.taobao.com and www.tmall.com

madmax108 10y ago

I work at a young company providing search as a service for multiple medium/big e-commerce sites (mostly those which don't have their own search teams) and 11/11 is indeed a crazy day. It's funny how till 2 years ago, Cyber Monday was the big event we looked at and we noticed major traffic spikes last year on veteran's day (11/11) only to later realize that this was in fact singles' day! This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected again! :)

Steeeve 10y ago

Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.

drifting 10y ago
If it's small and sent by ePacket (assuming you are in the US), then it will arrive fairly quickly
alaskamiller 10y ago
Aliexpress is US-based sellers with US-based warehousing so you get it directly in the US. The better deals are on alibaba outright for Chinese consumers.
- OrdaGarb 10y ago
  Of my 140 orders over the last two years on Aliexpress, only one has been originated in the US (California, to be exact). All but a few of the remainder were from China. I reside in Colorado. Mostly I buy hobby electronic components, chemicals/substances, and the occasional household or automotive item. I've used Alibaba.com as well, but the payment methods are far different and it's a more risky situation with fewer guarantees. That service I use for high-value orders after a thorough vetting of the seller. Mostly commodity items like a pallet of green coffee beans, or weird chemicals in unusual quantities. Sometimes an order on Aliexpress will be large enough that I must consider negotiating with someone on Alibaba.com instead. Negotiations happen for me on Aliexpress as well, but the sellers on Alibaba.com seem to have greater latitude in not only price, but also packing, shipping, and handling to destination.
jpablo 10y ago
It has a huge timer in the front page stating that the deals starts in about 11 hours from now.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gigatexal 10y ago

Isn't there an ongoing concern that a lot of what is sold on alibaba is counterfeit?

hncommenter13 10y ago

Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github here[1] and here[2]. There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software. Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail. [1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase [2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5 https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5 [3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.) I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7_2 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form. There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase

zoom6628 10y ago

I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled. I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids. Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.

pvlbdn 10y ago
Exactly my story last night. 9 out of 10 transactions failed.

tonosari 10y ago

It's the new Black Friday in China

richardhawthorn 10y ago

It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly the price I was seeing last week. I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying. Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.

pman2000 10y ago

These numbers are absolutely sick... I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!

ensiferum 10y ago

sigh and all that plastic crap just ends up in the landfill (ocean) half a year later. Instead we should have a "buy nothing day" that'd get celebrated for its 0$ sales.

rasz_pl 10y ago

1 Aliexpress thinks Im in russia 2 Aliexpress.com tries to make tons of UDP connections, WebRTC? (unable to disable in desktop chrome)

adgulacti 10y ago

retail type of bullshit, literally. stuffing all the sale into a single day when none of the physical or non-physical systems are designed or implemented to meet such peak demand. my current company does everything to eliminate such peaks, which makes sense considering customer satisfaction (service quality) and cost efficiency, and some guys like alibaba doing the opposite. nothing but marketing scam, prices getting bloated in the day before and discounts(?) exclusive to 11.11.