Alibaba has reached another new sales record on the biggest shopping event or known as Singles Day. If you thought Alibaba has reaped a great success by achieving more than $1 billion selling within the first two minutes in the Singles Day 2018, wait until you find out the result of Alibaba’s sale on this year’s Singles Day as the biggest shopping festival in the world that will impress you even more.
Since the first time it participated to the Singles Day in 2009, Alibaba continuously set a record in the global largest shopping festival in China that started every November. In 2016, the company has been officially recognized as the #1 Largest Retail Commerce Company Worldwide ever since they broke the sales record on Singles Day in 2015. Last year, Alibaba had generated US$30.8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in just 24 hours which beat other large ecommerce merchants like JD.com and Pinduoduo.
Meanwhile, in Singles Day 2019, another record has been broken by Alibaba which shows this online shopping business keeps growing beyond expectation. Within 68 seconds after the launch, the sales of Alibaba reached its first US$1 billion and US$10 billion in just half an hour. At the end of the day, the total GMV of Alibaba’s sale on Singles Day 2019 had surpassed US$38.4 billion, which is increasing 25,7% from last year. The total number of delivery orders also reached a new record, it increased 24% to 1.292 billion, compared to last year.
The Alibaba’s massive sale result was due to the contribution of the sellers and shoppers of this online shopping frenzy that were not only from China, but also from across the world. Alibaba recorded that more than 22.000 international brands from 78 countries are participating this year, which giving Alibaba cross-border strength.
More than 544,000 transactions per seconds were done yet Alibaba still can achieve strong sales without any hurdles on Singles Day that beats the records in its 11th year. With the exceptional accomplishment, have you ever wondered what kind of technology that Alibaba utilizes to support the business?
When we talk about Alibaba’s technology that were used during the Singles Day, then we were talking about the best quality of payment systems, interactive shopping activity through gamification, and live streams as the core elements to reach customer’s experience and satisfaction. Customers are seeking for efficiency, reliability, and agility when it comes to fulfilling their needs through shopping online. Therefore, on one-day online shopping bonanza like Alibaba’s Singles Day, customers were expecting to get their preferred products as fast as possible before anyone else, causing Alibaba’s e-commerce traffic spike to be very high at the first few minutes.
To cope with the situation, Alibaba has run 100% of their core system to its own public cloud that amazingly increased the application performance, reliability, and agility even if they were at the highest traffic in order to share Alibaba Group’s experience with all customers and take their business to the next level.
Some of the key technologies that were responsible for the success of this largest global shopping event include X-Dragon on cloud which an elastic bare metal servers improved cost efficiency by 20%, advanced data processing and analytic that helped Alibaba processed around 970PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, AI-enabled features to empower sellers which enable customers to try on clothes and jewelry, further engaging customers via rich, interactive content and an Omni channel experience, and many more outstanding technologies.
With Alibaba Cloud’s maturity in handling any mission-critical in global-scale business through emerging technologies that were utilized in contributing the largest shopping festival in the world, Alibaba was not only offering customers cheaper products with fantastic discounts and promotions, but also immersive experience when buying some products. No wonder why Alibaba’s Singles Day is always awaited by online shoppers across the world.
