What you need to know about China’s biggest online shopping day

We’re only a few days away from the world’s biggest shopping bonanza, when hundreds of millions of people in China jump onto the web and buy billions of dollars worth of stuff in a 24-hour period. It’s way bigger than America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday – combined.

In China, this shopapalooza is called Singles Day. It’s on November 11. Alibaba’s marketplaces have discounts and pretty much every rival site has sales too. It’s the craziest day in China’s huge ecommerce market, which is tipped to hit about US$1.2 trillion in spending during the course of this year.

How did China’s Singles Day start out? How on earth did it become so massive? Our comic explains all.