Single’s Day shopping shows young generation’s favour

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Staff members celebrate in front of a giant screen displaying total gross merchandise volume of Alibaba's Tmall online marketplace for the Singles' Day shopping spree, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 11:30pm, 12 Nov 2016Updated: 8:58am, 13 Nov 2016

No event offers a better view into the changing nature of the mainland’s online shoppers than Singles’ Day, and the picture that emerged this year was that buying is shifting dramatically to mobile devices.

Online shoppers bought 120.7 billion yuan (US$17.79 billion) worth of goods on November 11 through the Alibaba Group’s e-commerce platforms, up 32 per cent from last year and a new high.

Purchases made through mobile devices surged 49 per cent, to hit US$14.6 billion, accounting for 82 per cent of total gross merchandise volume, also a record, according to Alibaba data.

Staff members take photos of a giant screen displaying the total gross merchandise volume of Tmall for Singles' Day. Photo: Xinhua

The company’s online payment system, Alipay, processed more than 1 billion transactions in total, or about 120,000 per second at the peak. “This year’s [event] is a preview of the future of retail, where entertainment, commerce and interactive engagement intersect seamlessly,” said Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chief executive officer. “The young generation born after 1990 is becoming the main source of consumption. They have a vastly different lifestyle and consumption pattern,” he said.