China’s 24-hour online shopfest explodes into life with $2 billion spent in first hour

The world’s biggest shopping day just kicked off in China with the start of Singles Day, the annual online shopfest. At the end of the first hour of discounts, at 1am Beijing time, China’s two biggest ecommerce sites, Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, saw consumers spend US$2 billion (RMB 12.3 billion). Yes, in just 60 minutes.

That surpasses last year’s first hour tally of just over US$1 billion on Alibaba’s sites.

Last year’s 24-hour spending tally on Alibaba’s estores hit US$5.8 billion, a record that will likely be shattered by the end of the day.

Before the sales even began at midnight, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said the company was seeing huge traffic on the sites as shoppers loaded their baskets in readiness for the discounts to appear. Zhang attributed the stronger traffic compared to last year to more shoppers browsing on mobile devices after getting home from work. The company has declined to predict how big the Singles Day spending total could be this year.

Alibaba CEO Jonathan Lu (left) and COO Daniel Zhang talk to media before the discounts started at midnight.

Chinese and overseas media swarmed on Alibaba’s HQ in Hangzhou, eastern China, to watch the numbers generated by the nation’s online shoppers in the company’s big data war room (pictured top). Alibaba’s recent IPO, has raised the profile of China’s top ecommerce company.

China’s other estores, such as JD and Amazon China, also offered discounts and other shopping incentives, though no data is yet available. Amazon upped its pace in China, a market where it has long been an also-ran, for this year’s Singles Day by offering Chinese shoppers products from around the world.

China’s Singles Day surpassed America’s Cyber Monday in expenditure in 2012.

See: India’s ecommerce market rocketing to $6 billion next year – nearly double the current level