Singles’ Day, the shopping event that makes Black Friday look like a yard sale

November 11 is China’s Singles’ Day, a national online shopping feast. Started by Alibaba in 2009, its sales volume now is bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

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Singles’ Day, the shopping event that makes Black Friday look like a yard sale

Julianna Wu

Published: 9:39pm, 7 Nov 2018Updated: 8:09am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Being single can be kinda sad. So why not cheer yourself up with some shopping?

That’s what a few lonely Chinese university students thought in the 1990s. They wanted to celebrate their single status by treating themselves, and since “11/11” looks like four lonely men standing next to each other, they held their little shopping spree on November 11th.

From those humble beginnings, the world’s largest shopping event was born, dwarfing Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The students may have started it, but the day didn’t really take off until Alibaba got involved. In 2003, Alibaba took Singles’ Day to the next level by branding it as an annual shopping festival, providing steep discounts on both of its ecommerce platforms: Taobao and Tmall (named as Taobao Mall back then).

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

More and more customers and retailers joined in, turning it into a day marked around the country. And the numbers are staggering: The total sales of Tmall and JD.com on 2017’s Singles’ Day was almost four times bigger than same year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

And those are just two shopping platforms!