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

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/alibaba-posts-1-billion-in-sales-in-5-minutes-on-singles-day

by fmihaila • 10 years ago

247 91 10 years ago

kogepathic• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Alibaba also includes taobao and taobao mall which do sell foreign brands.

It's not just Aliexpress...

laurentdc2• 10 years 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.

tsunamifury2• 10 years 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.

linkregister2• 10 years 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.

baybal23• 10 years ago

underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France

Believe me or no. Italian effective tax rate for a factory business is less than that in China.

Most Italian shoe and fashion goods factories in Italy are owned by Chinese these days.

seanmcdirmid• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

Cerium• 10 years 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.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 10 years ago

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

nostromo• 10 years ago

That's addressed in the last three paragraphs of the article.

miguelrochefort2• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap microcontrollers and what not.

fapjacks• 10 years 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.

50CNT• 10 years 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.

Cyph0n• 10 years ago

Same here. I think I should get back to adding more stuff!

dodgedcactii• 10 years ago

What about for small electronics like stuff I'd get from geekbuying?

voltagex_• 10 years ago

Aren't GeekBuying just sourcing from Alibaba anyway?

criddell• 10 years ago

What country are you in? How long are the shipping times for you?

miguelrochefort2• 10 years ago

What country are you in?

Canada.

How long are the shipping times for you?

Very long, but I'm not in a hurry. Between 2 weeks and 2 months.

kimshibal• 10 years ago

AliExpress is small compare to Tmall/taobao

andr• 10 years ago

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

hueving2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

busterarm• 10 years ago

That's just a $10K loss.

abc_lisper• 10 years ago

It is not that hard. I work on a similar system, with a demand of maybe 30 minutes(take a guess, there are not may of us) over the entire year.

What I do is, have an active-active system in a data center, and with another similar system in another DC.

Having said that, your average online stock brokers do the same thing.

throwmeOct7• 10 years ago

30 minutes once a year? That sounds like my sex life

dalbasal• 10 years ago

I guess if they run a 0.001% risk of doing something disastrous then it doesn't cut it. If 0.001% of purchases fail or orders get lost, or they have a few minutes of complete downtime, it might not be worth adding another 9.

It says something interesting about how think about "high reliability." What it really means is "must never, ever fail" which kind of makes "% reliability" a sort of strange euphemism, I think.

adrianN• 10 years ago

High reliability means that it is much more likely that something else fails first. We could all be wiped out by a gamma ray burst for example, it makes little sense to make something last longer in expectation than the expected time between two major extinction events.

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

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

dndyh• 10 years ago

very good!!!

KaoruAoiShiho2• 10 years ago

I know weex is being worked on by alibaba but is it actually confirmed that the live app is using this?

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

Yes, I confirmed that.

m1• 10 years ago

Is their actual app using weex though?

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

Alibaba's TaoBao and TMall are using it actually.

MrBuddyCasino3• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Just curious; why would a german webshop have hong kong tld?

wodenokoto2• 10 years ago

tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.

est• 10 years ago

I think it's because tmall.com was overwhelmed by Chinese brands.

Chinese people usually think HK stuff was more wester like, so a .hk tld stands for foreign goods.

ngokevin3• 10 years ago

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.

I visited Alibaba HQ last month. People seemed pretty worked and driven by deadlines which can decrease their code quality. The teams I talked to didn't do much testing.

MrBuddyCasino3• 10 years ago

That figures. China (Bejing) is 7 hours ahead of german time, yet I've noticed that my Tmall contacts are replying to messages when it is really late at night for them, sometimes excusing themselves that they have dinner right now. On 11.11 many are on duty for 24 hours.

Off topic, but in contrast to americans, german people are often frowning and complaining a lot - even though we really don't have much cause, in comparison. Friendliness and positivity are some of the things I really appreciate about the USA. Treasure it!

brandur• 10 years 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-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-alib...

[2] https://github.com/alibaba

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

Weex is one of those technologies. It was running on TaoBao app actually.

https://github.com/alibaba/weex

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

Weex is a framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI. https://alibaba.github.io/weex

marban• 10 years ago

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

wenbin• 10 years ago

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

baybal23• 10 years 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.

jandrese2• 10 years 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.

ngokevin3• 10 years ago

All of China hitting your servers aren't considered a DDOS by itself?

nsomaru• 10 years ago

Not sure it's called DoS when the traffic is legitimate

jandrese2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

It's 11/11 in parts of Asia already.

Hanks101006• 10 years ago

There sales is on the www.taobao.com and www.tmall.com

madmax108• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

If it's small and sent by ePacket (assuming you are in the US), then it will arrive fairly quickly

alaskamiller2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

It has a huge timer in the front page stating that the deals starts in about 11 hours from now.

gigatexal• 10 years ago

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

hncommenter13• 10 years 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

[2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5

[3] 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...] 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

zoom6628• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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

tonosari• 10 years ago

It's the new Black Friday in China

richardhawthorn• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

These numbers are absolutely sick...

I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!

ensiferum• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

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

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