Alibaba’s Singles Day sale breaks last year’s spending record with 10 hours still to go

China’s online sales bonanza, dubbed Singles Day, exploded into life last night. With China’s ecommerce market still in a strong growth surge, many anticipate this latest Singles Day spending tally to exceed last year’s. At Alibaba’s HQ this afternoon that was confirmed by the real-time data showing that last year’s full-day total of US$5.9 billion spent by consumers was reached at 1:30pm local time today.

With just over ten hours still to go, it’s now obvious that China’s shopapolooza will be a record-breaker.

Alibaba’s data covers the value of items purchased on its Tmall and Taobao marketplaces, which are China’s largest estores. Alibaba’s customers have so far clicked their way to US$6.1 billion in expenditure since midnight (at the time of publishing at 2pm local time), generating 170 million packages.

Virtually all of China’s ecommerce sites are taking part in the sales bonanza by offering their own discounts and other sopping incentives. Rival sites like JD and Amazon China are also anticipating 24-hour sales records.

See: This bite-sized boutique startup is undaunted by fashion giants like Zalora