Alibaba: king of the holiday season

Tamebay.com reports that Alibaba, the most powerful, well-known Chinese marketplace platform, is the absolute king of the 2018 holiday sales. Comparing the United States versus Alibaba Holiday sales for 2018, Alibaba’s Single’s Day beat all four American Cyber weekend sales combined.

Adobe tracked sales in the United States during Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday ($6.2 billion), Small Business Saturday ($3.02 billion), and Cyber Monday ($7.9 billion). The total turnover of these four sales-days was $20.47 billion. On the other hand is Alibaba, which sold products worth $30.8 billion during Single’s Day on the 11th of November. It is known that JD.com also broke the US holiday sales total with sales of $23 billion. These numbers were spread 11 days though, from the 1st to the 11th of November.

China is dwarfing American e-commerce but is still a difficult country to target for western retailers, as Chinese consumers expect a very different kind of service. The mobile-oriented services are still a relative unknown field to Western online retailers. The future of Chinese e-commerce looks bright, for Western retailers as well. According to Forrester, the Chinese e-commerce market will reach $1.8tn in 2022. It will roughly be double the size of e-commerce in the United States.