• Quartz, Tuesday, November 15, 2016 9:43 AM

The volume of merchandise sold on Singles Day—the predominately Chinese event that occurs on 11.11 and is basically the invention of ecommerce behemoth Alibaba—is jawdropping. This year, in just the first two hours of the world’s biggest shopping day, sales on Alibaba platforms alone topped $7 billion. In the hours since, they have blown past last year’s total of about $14.3 billion, and are expected to reach $20 billion. For comparison’s sake, combined Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the US in 2015 were about $13.5 billion—and keep in mind that’s across all retailers. The Singles Day figures above are just within Alibaba’s ecommerce ecosystem, which works differently than a site such as Amazon. These sales to consumers are happening on Alibaba’s site Tmall, where brands can set up their own storefront, and Taobao, a peer-to-peer site similar to eBay. Alibaba also has its main platform, which deals in wholesale.

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