Singles' Day falls on every November 11th. No one is quite sure exactly who first thought it up, and the most widely-accepted story is that it emerged from the dorms of Nanjing University in 1993 when four single male students got together to discuss how to break free of the loneliness of single life. One suggested that because of the ones in the date, November 11 would be a good day to organize activities for singles.
Singles' Day, started by a small group of friends, gradually grew into something like the anti-Valentine's Day, a day China's single young people could use as an excuse to get together and have fun together.
Originally about being with friends and having fun, now Singles' Day is about shopping — mostly online shopping. How did this happen?It's a long story, but the short answer is Alibaba.
By the late 2000s, most of China's Internet users were familiar with Singles' Day. There might have been some small shops online and offline offering sales on that day earlier, but no major company until Alibaba launched its first Singles' Day online sale in 2009.
In that first year, Alibaba was the only major ecommerce company to offer a sale, and it featured just 27 brands offering discounts via its T-mall marketplace. The sale was definitely successful, but it wasn't enough to redefine the holiday on its own.
In the following year, Alibaba went bigger, offering more brands and deeper discounts. But other companies had noticed the potential of the 2009 sales bonanza and decided to follow suit. E-commerce platforms like JD had their first major Singles' Day sales in 2010, and overnight Singles' Day went from a T-mall sale to something that was beginning to look like Cyber Monday in some western countries.
Over the next few years, Alibaba, JD, and other Chinese e-commerce players all expanded their one-day discounts, and sales grew exponentially（以指数方式）. On Singles' Day in 2012, Alibaba's marketplaces, Taobao and T-mall, did about $3 billion in sales. In 2013 that number nearly doubled, and Chinese shoppers had obliterated America's Cyber Monday spending records in just the first few hours of the sale. And it's only getting bigger.
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