China’s biggest shopping day, dubbed Singles Day, just wrapped up yesterday. The sum of money spent – a grand total of US $17.7 billion in just 24 hours on Alibaba’s marketplaces – is so vast that it’s hard to put into perspective. So here are some ways to frame it:
- China’s Singles Day was bigger than nine months of ecommerce in India – that’s because India is set to see US $23.4 billion in online shopping during the course of 2016.
- This year’s Singles Day, which comes round every November 11, was three times bigger than America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined in 2015.
- The day accounted for 2% of China’s total online shopping expenditure this year – an anticipated US $911 billion, rising to beyond a trillion bucks in 2017.
- All the money spent was just short of Afghanistan’s estimated GDP this year – and precisely twice that of the Republic of Congo.