Major online shopping promotions for China’s “singles’ day” on Monday were expected to take in some 30 billion yuan ($ 5 billion), reports said.
The Tmall.com site run by China’s biggest online retailer, Taobao.com, registered 100 million ($ 16 million) in sales in the first minute of trading, 1 billion yuan within 6 minutes and 10 billion yuan within the first six hours, state media said.
November 11 became known as “singles’ day” in China because of the graphic resemblence of the four ones in the date to “old sticks.” Many young singles meet in restaurants and bars to mark the date.
Online sales promotions on the date began in 2009, reaching about $3 billion on November 11 last year.
China’s online shopping portals earned some 1.3 trillion yuan last year out of the country’s estimated total e-commerce revenue of 8.1 trillion yuan, according to Government data.