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Alibaba's Singles' Day sales exceed predictions at $9.3B
- w1ntermute 12y agoSingles' Day sales that reveal a lot: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-11/09/content_18889439.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-11/09/content_188894...
- spydum 12y agosooo, not exactly related to Alibaba, but they sure do take this Singles Day thing seriously?! that is a heck of a sales promo stunt
- untog 12y agoHaving seen the videos of Walmarts opening on Black Friday I wouldn't say the US is much different.
- georgemcbay 12y agoWe wear a lot more clothes to the sales here, which is a good thing because we are in far worse shape.
- sremani 12y agoI would be surprised if Singles day is not popular in US within next 5 or so years.
- character0 12y agoI think this is actually a marketing holiday that was created by Alibaba. From the article: The idea of Singles Day was first dreamed up by the recently floated e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd five years ago to encourage people without partners to comfort themselves with some retail therapy. Record 'Singles Day' online sales expected The company's two major online marketplaces, Tmall and Taobao, are expected to remain the most popular shopping sites again this year, according to 70 percent of those surveyed by Nielson, who this year are on average expecting to spend 1,440 yuan ($235). Just over half of those polled (57 percent) said they planned to spend more than last year.
- therealdrag0 12y agoThere's a similar comercial holiday in Korea called Pepero Day. And it's also based on the 1's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepero#Pepero_Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepero#Pepero_Day
- westiseast 12y agoI blogged about this the last two years - it's an incredible technical challenge as well as the huge sales side of things. Amazing
- redwood 12y agoThat's one site doing 3x the combined total sites' 2013 Cyber Monday. Pivotal moment as the center of gravity of the world's consumer economy shifts to China. The fervent dive into consumerism is incredible. Anyone in China seeing a counter culture emerging against this? Or is it too early
- BobMarz 12y agoConsumerization of PRC! from the article: "Please Singles' Day, can you pass by quickly?," reads a typical comment. "I didn't think I needed anything until today when I feel like I need everything I see. I'm so helpless!"
- melling 12y agoYes, we're in the Century of China. It's amazing how far China has come in the past 15 years. Next person on the moon will be from China? 20,000 miles of high-speed rail? Largest subway system in the world. From 0 to the biggest in 20 years. The largest everything...
- maxerickson 12y agoWhy 20 years? A reasonable zero for modern China seems to me to be the end of the Cultural Revolution (I went and touched up my history to phrase it that way, but my notion was that the early 80s provide a better starting point than 1994 or 2000). I'm curious what you (and others) think, not trying to have a hair splitting argument about it.
- thaumasiotes 12y agoYasheng Huang actually makes the argument that (from a policy perspective) China was better off in the 80s and regressed in the 90s. http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Chinese-Characteristics-Entrepreneurship-State/dp/0521898102/ http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Chinese-Characteristics-Ent...
- melling 12y agoSorry, I was referring to the Shanghai Subway. It was built over 20 years and is bigger than the NYC Subway. I checked and Beijing is actually bigger and started much earlier, however, and carries about a billion more people. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway
- merrua 12y agoThe aliexpress sales are really good this year. Around 40% of users on mobile https://twitter.com/Alizila https://twitter.com/Alizila
- mrfusion 12y agoI must be misunderstanding Alibaba. I thought it was related to buying wholesale goods to resell?
- paulrosenzweig 12y agoAlibaba.com is for wholesale, but Alibaba the company is much broader than that. They have two big consumer sites: Taobao.com and Tmall.com
- thaumasiotes 12y agoThey've also got a consumer site oriented towards foreigners - aliexpress.com
- shaftoe 12y agoIt's fascinating there's a company so large and it's completely unknown to the American market.
- Robadob 12y agoWhats the likely hood of receiving fake products if ordering from this site? I've had it happen myself with Amazon 3rd party sellers, however this site being in china makes me even more wary.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoI've given up ; I never received anything I ordered from China.
- rndstr 12y agoI ordered 11 products this year (albeit small ones) and got every single one of them.
- icebraining 12y agoI've ordered many things (small accessories, cellphone & tablet screens, a cheap Android tablet, etc) from both Aliexpress and Chinese stores on eBay and always got what was announced. The cellphone screen was damaged, and they sent me another one without having to ship the first back or show any proof of the damage. Besides the long shipping times (1-2 months to my door), it's been more reliable than shopping locally.
- kev6168 12y agoThis seems to be Alibaba's github page. https://github.com/alibaba https://github.com/alibaba Among the projects Tengine is the powerful web server (based on Nginx) used at Tmall.com and Taobao.com.
- jamra 12y agoThat's pretty cool. They implemented sticky sessions for Nginx .
- samstave 12y agoWas looking at Tengine as well, it seems pretty awesome. Anyone use it in production (that is not Alibaba?) and have comments on it?
- ninjaplease 12y agoLooks like archive.org is using it. https://wappalyzer.com/applications/tengine https://wappalyzer.com/applications/tengine Also seems to be a lot of overlap with Openresty (http://openresty.org/ http://openresty.org/)
- Igglyboo 12y agoI wonder if Amazon is worried.
- innguest 12y agoThey should be. Amazon makes no profits and operates in dollars. Those are two things you don't want to get caught doing right now.
- jahnu 12y agoWhat is wrong with dollars?
- innguest 12y agoI'm being downvoted to mean this is not the place to discuss this or I'm straying too far. If you want to know, read up on the Zero Hedge blog (I'm not affiliated, I'm just a reader, etc etc). But basically what's wrong is Russia and China (so 1.5 billion people) plus the Middle East are all tired of the petrodollar and want out badly.
- eclipxe 12y agoAmazon's profits are redeployed into investments.
- pessimizer 12y agoThat's Amazon's PR, yes. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/franklin-foer-confuses-amazons-subsidies-from-the-govvernment-with-profits http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/franklin-... "The people who say that this is due to the fact that they are investing in building up their business are showing their ignorance. Reinvesting and profits are two separate issues. Profits reflect the difference between revenues and costs on current business operations. These can all be used for investment in expansion (as opposed to being paid out as dividends and share buybacks), but they should still show up as profits. Amazon doesn't show profits or at least not much. This means that it costs them as much to run their business as they are getting from customers in revenue. That is not viable as a long-term model even if they are always expanding." ----- edit: [from a comment on that page] Title: "Nothing Depreciates In Less Than 5 Years" "Sorry folks, there is no way that would keep Jeff Bezos out of jail where their greater investment would explain the lack of accounting profit. There is nothing that depreciates in less than 5 years (20 percent annual rate) and most items at a considerably faster rate. This means the difference in re-investment rates could at best knock off a small share of Amazon's profits if they are not committing fraud. "The math on this is simple. Assume Amazon's 'true' profits are rising 15 percent a year. Assume that they re-invest 100 percent of their profits, as oppose to the 30-40 percent that would be more typical. The higher depreciation over the last five years in this case would account for just 47 percent of Amazon's current year profits. The number would fall sharply if we assume the true rate of profit growth is 20 percent or higher and that some of Amazon's investments depreciate in more than 5 years."
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- tszming 12y agoYou can get an authenticated Gap's Shirt (from their official tmall) for around $15-20 USD (after discount/coupons, currently $40-50 on gap.com), so the deal is not bad even you compare with the coming US holidays discounts.
- foobarqux 12y agoWere there any good deals for Westerners?
- icebraining 12y agoAliexpress has plenty of stuff today with 50-90% discount. Like an MP3 player for $1.6 - with free shipping!
- notastartup 12y agothat breaks on arrival
- tsax 12y agoI bought a couple winter coats from them. BEWARE of the size, as obvious as it sounds, but I can often wear Medium or even Small sized clothes at H&M and Zara, so I picked 'Large' on Aliexpress and I swear it would be an Extra-Extra-Small here in the US.
- joelthelion 12y agoI wonder to which extent these predictions are willingly underestimated in order to make the headlines?
- adventured 12y agoHere's an interesting fact that a lot of people don't seem to realize about Alibaba: they're an advertising company. They generate over 50% of their revenue from ads.
- irollboozers 12y agoMakes you think about the sheer amount of traffic. Incredible.
- adventured 12y agoIt's an interesting concept they put together. It's akin to the problem Google posed for Microsoft, in that there was no price to undercut as they did with Netscape (since Google's search is obviously free). That's how Alibaba was able to essentially eliminate eBay from the China market (eBay purchased a leading market / platform play, and had a meaningful position in China, prior to Alibaba's lift-off); eBay was charging fees for listings, mirroring their approach in the US, and Alibaba didn't. How do you compete against that? You pretty much have to be another Chinese juggernaut like Tencent or Baidu to even attempt it.