Anything interesting you noticed over there over the past couple days?  You would’ve watched a group of geeks across the pacific enthusiastically web chatting and digging from the inside out about the stellar transaction volume of two Chinese commerce sites–Taobao and Tmall

The new world record in online shopping

They were talking about the annual Chinese online shopping carnival on November 11, during which day Taobao (an eBay-like marketplace) and Tmall (a B2C platform) totaled RMB 19.1 billion (approx. 3.06 billion CAD dollar), making the number a new world record. Previously the record belongs to the 2011 “Cyber Monday” in the US, where total sales was $1.25 billion according to com Score’s statistics.

And what else intrigued the geeks? Well, these threads(let’s just ignore the slightly ‘unpleasant’ part as such stuff comes along with almost anything labeled China) might help explain a little bit

• Total sales: 19.1 billion RMB
• In the first 1 minute, 10m people had visited Tmall
• Top 5 provinces by #sales: Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Beijing
• 1hr after the promotion opened, the first package was received.
• After 12 hours, 109 stores had made more than 10m RMB sales.
• The two biggest mens clothing brands : Jack & Jones and GXG
• Tmall made 13.2bn RMB, taobao made 5.9bn RMB
• There were 213m registered accounts were active on this day (40% of China’s internet users)
• 105m orders – av. order value of 180RMB
• 3 stores made more than 100m RMB on the day.
• There were 7m mobile accounts active in the first 1 hour.

By 2 pm, 520m RMB of sales had been made via the mobile interface.