Singles Day celebrated by China every November 11 is one of the biggest shopping spree days in the country that can only be comparable to Black Friday in U.S., or Boxing Day in UK. Online Chinese retailer Alibaba has set a brand new record this year, completing business transactions at a much faster rate than last year.

In less than 18 seconds, the Chinese retailer sold RMB 1 billion (RMB 160 million) worth of goods, by 12 minutes and 28 seconds the total online transaction value jumped to RMB 10 billion. Only a fraction of the time it took to reach the same record sales last year. On Singles Day in 2014, it took 2 minutes for sales to reach RMB 1 billion, and 38 minutes and 28 seconds to skyrocket to RMB 10 billion. From midnight to 9:52 AM this morning, Alibaba sold in total RMB 50 billion worth of goods. Some experts estimate Alibaba’s total sales might exceed RMB 80 billion this year, which is highly probable at the rate it is going.

Tmall's recorded sales during November 11, 2015. (LEDinside)

Sales after midnight are the highlight of Alibaba’s compiled Singles Day statistics every year, with sales records being broken every year.

Many projected this year’s Singles Day sales would be unable to set new sales records, due to the economic slowdown, but the Chinese people have once again proven otherwise with their mighty consumer power.

China is swept over by a nationwide online shopping frenzy at the strike of midnight every year on November 11, allowing payment platforms including AliPay to compile significant amount of consumer data over the course of time. AliPay, a subsidiary of Ant Financial reported completing 85,900 transactions per second during peak hours of Singles Day this year, which is 2.23 times that of 38,500 deals per second sealed during the same period last year.

Alibaba claims the rate of transactions greatly surpassed global online payment platforms Visa and MasterCard’s processing capacities, and far exceeds the two companies combined research data. This indicates China’s online payment system technology, which survived the gargantuan volume of online transaction during this year’s Singles Day, is far more advanced than other international payment systems.

Worth noting is Chinese online retailer Tmall completed RMB 1 billion worth of transactions in 1 minute and 28 seconds after midnight on Nov. 11, 2015, up to 74.83% of the RMB 10 billion worth of transactions were completed from using wireless devices. This also set a new historic record.

Starting from Nov. 11, 2014, Opple Lighting topped Tmall’s lighting products (light sources, luminaires, and decorative lighting) sales list, as the Chinese lighting manufacturer actively deploys its ecommerce strategy. The company defended its leading position this year, selling RMB 94.5 million worth of goods, about triple the sales revenue of the second runner-up.

Statistics from 2015 also show Tmall set a new record high during this year’s Singles Day. Opple Lighting has also benefited from this and broke its previous Singles Day record, selling RMB 70 million worth of goods within a span of nine hours.

Although, lighting manufacturers have not published their revenue statistics for Nov. 11, 2015, it can be seen from Opple’s Lighting’s stats that ecommerce will play an increasingly important role in lighting sales.

(Author: Skavy Cheng, Editor, China, LEDinsidehttp:// Translator: Judy Lin, Chief Editor, LEDinside)