This week, China saw its biggest online shopping spree of the year as part of the “Singles Day” festival. This interesting tradition was started by Chinese college students in the 1990s as a Valentine’s Day of sorts for people who aren’t in a relationship.
They picked November 11 because it was “11.11” which showed four singles. The idea of the day is for unattached people to treat each other to dinner or to give gifts to try to court people that they are interested in dating and to end their single status.
Lucky for online stores – the event has turned into the biggest day of the year for online shopping and a busy day for delivery services. China’s delivery companies actually had 800,000 employees working on November 11th, including 65,000 who were hired temporarily just to help out that day.
China actually has the world’s biggest population of online shoppers; as there are 193 million shoppers in contrast to the 170 million in the US. The largest e-commerce platform in China, Tmall.com kicked off their Singles Day promotions at midnight on Monday and had 116 million RMB ((£11million) in sales. The total revenue online for the day reached 35 billion RMB (around £3.5 billion). Last year the sales total was 19.1 billion RMB (about £2 billion).