Gross sales across Alibaba Group’s consumer shopping sites surpassed $9.3 billion over the last 24 hours on what is the company’s biggest sale day of the year. The total marks a more than 60 percent increase from last year’s November 11 total of $5.75 billion in gross merchandise sales.
Alibaba introduced the 24-hour sale — known as the 11.11 Shopping Festival or the Singles Day sale — in 2009 on its Tmall marketplace, where big global brands such as Nike and Uniqlo set up online storefronts. Since then, it has extended the 50-percent-off sale to Alibaba’s other shopping sites, including Taobao and group-buying site Juhuasuan.
To give you a sense of how big this sale is, the $9.3 billion Singles Day total dwarfs the $3.6 billion that U.S. shoppers spent online last year on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, according to comScore. And the total could still grow higher; Alibaba’s Aliexpress site, which targets Western shoppers, is running its sale through the end of November 11 in the Pacific timezone.
While the sale is monstrous, Alibaba only records a fraction of the total as revenue, since it is merely operating shopping marketplaces and not selling the goods itself. On Taobao, which features small sellers, Alibaba does not take a cut of sales, instead making money by selling advertising placements. On Tmall, Alibaba takes a cut, typically two percent to five percent, of each transaction, according to information on Tmall’s website.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
