Chinese spend billions of dollars in minutes on Singles' Day

Chinese consumers today spent over USD one billion in the first five minutes of "Singles Day", an annual online shopping fiesta, with e-commerce giant Alibaba registering record sales.
Sales on Alibaba had surpassed 10 billion yuan (USD 1.47 billion) in six minutes 58 seconds, almost six minutes ahead of last year, the company said.
Gome, another e-commerce site, recorded a 366-per cent year-on-year surge in orders in the first hour, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
As of 9 AM (local time), total sales across 16 of China's major e-commerce platforms had already topped 76 billion yuan (over USD 10 billion), according to data provider Syntun which has been monitoring the real-time transactions of the top 16.

Put forward by Alibaba as the Chinese version of Black Friday, Singles' Day has grown into a huge competition for market share among Chinese e-commerce companies.
Of the 76-billion yuan transactions, 74.2 per cent were made through platforms managed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, 16.4 per cent through JD.Com and 2.8 per cent on home appliance retailer Suning.Com.

This year's online shopping bonanza saw an increase in the number of mobile transactions, with 83 per cent of the purchases completed on mobile devices.
According to Internet industry research agency iResearch, China's online shopping market's sales volume was 1.1 trillion yuan in the second quarter, up by 27.6 per cent from the same period last year.

It also estimated the volume would exceed 1.5 trillion in the fourth quarter.