President of the NYSE Thomas Farley joined Alibaba's President Ma Yun to ring the opening bell for the stock exchange across the Pacific Ocean at 10:30 p.m. in Beijing on Wednesday.
One hour and a half later, sales of Alibaba's Tmall online marketplace topped 91.2 billion yuan (14.3 bln U.S. dollars) from this year's Singles' Day shopping spree, a 60-percent rise from last year's 57.1 bln yuan.
In the meantime, Mayaghube, a Hui ethnic minority businessman, was counting the Singles' Day turnover for his online sheepskin clothes shop -- 2.2 million yuan, equaled to the monthly income of all his 19 brick-and-mortar stores added.
Starting as in-joke and an excuse for the unattached to celebrate -- or poke fun at -- their status, Singles' Day evolved into an online shopping spree for everyone starting seven years ago. This year, residents and shop owners in rural areas are leading the trend.
According to the company's Zhejiang HQ in east China, rural residents joined the shopping spree in more than 8,000 centers set up by the company offering free Internet access to shop. They purchased a record number of down feather quilts, thermal underwear items and washing machines. The most popular digital products were iPhones and TV sets.0 Sales generated in rural areas topped 10 million yuan just eight minutes after midnight. At 1:48 a.m. on the big day, a parcel placed by a farmer in southwest China's Zhuping Village arrived at his doorstep.
Over 68 percent of transactions were made on wireless devices such as smartphones and tablets during China's equivalent of Cyber Monday, Alibaba's data showed.
Cellphones became the most popular products, with a whopping 3.13 million sets sold on the day, followed by nuts, milk, honey, cars, apples, TV sets and watches. Tmall is applying to Guinness World Records to recognize the sales of the eight items as single-day records.
Tmall said 232 countries and regions and more than 5,000 overseas brands participated in the promotion. The United States, Japan, Republic of Korea, Germany and Australia ranked as the top five countries in terms of imported products.
Courier service providers also had a sleepless night, because the purchases meant 467 million parcels needing to be delivered nationwide. The first parcel was signed 14 minutes after the order was placed, and it took one and a half hours for the first cross-border parcel to arrive in the hands of its buyer, according to Alibaba.
Cainiao Network, which managed about 80 percent of the parcels from Tmall, used big data to help courier companies optimize process and improve delivery efficiency.
Over 200 banks and Alipay, Alibaba's online financial service, processed 710 million payments in 24 hours, peaking at 85,900 deals per second.
Alibaba's chief technology officer Wang Jian said Alipay and banks had endured more than 400 pressure tests during the several months ahead of Nov. 11. "Our payment platform's processing capability leads the world."
In addition to courier and payment services, the Singles' Day shopping excitement also prompted traditional department stores to reinvent their service.
It is estimated more than 180,000 stores in 330 cities across the country joined the revelry by offering better consumption experience, an offline-fitting, online-purchasing plan, and even lower prices.
"People used to say the United States is a country on wheels, I think China is a country on the Internet. The combination of Internet and traditional economy creates immeasurable opportunities for future consumption and innovation," Alibaba President Jack Ma said.
