
Alibaba's Singles' Day sales surge 60 percent to $14.3B - jschwartz11
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940
======
nieksand
Good post pointing out probable hanky panky behind these claims:

[http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-interview-
ques...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-interview-questions-
size-and-scope.html)

~~~
ericabiz
The guy who wrote this post literally has no idea what he's talking about.

He makes two completely faulty assumptions:

1) Only Chinese people buy from Alibaba.

I co-own a retail store here in the US and we order a lot of stuff from
Aliexpress. We are a Gold VIP on Aliexpress ($4,000 in sales every 90 days to
maintain this level; we do about $1.5-2K/month average on there.)

If you read the reviews of products on Aliexpress, you'll see reviews in just
about every language--English, French, Russian, etc. In fact, very few of the
reviews are from Chinese customers. Ali is most definitely a platform (two
different platforms, actually, with Aliexpress and Alibaba) for China to sell
to the rest of the world. Not necessarily for China to sell to China.

2) They'd need some sort of huge fulfillment centers a la Amazon.

The genius of the Aliexpress business model is that it works like eBay
(Alibaba I'd more likely compare to LinkedIn, as it's even less centralized.)
Sellers fulfill orders themselves, post tracking numbers, and live
chat/message with buyers to complete the loop. Some sellers take Alipay, which
is the Paypal to Aliexpress's eBay. Others take Paypal, wire transfers, etc.
There is absolutely no gigantic warehouse needed by Alibaba.

All of these assumptions that he guessed so wrong on could have easily been
disproven by ordering a few $2 items off Aliexpress and having them shipped to
his house to see how the business model works. It's pretty straightforward!

~~~
1024core
> We are a Gold VIP on Aliexpress ($4,000 in sales every 90 days to maintain
> this level; we do about $1.5-2K/month average on there.)

Even $2k/month does not reach $4K per 90 days.

EDIT: Oops, sorry. I apologize for this silly error. I know it sounds bizarre,
but I was converting 90 minutes to 1.5 hours a minute ago, and for some reason
converted "90 days" to "1.5 months". :-)

Or maybe I can blame it on an errant gamma ray that tweaked a bit in one of my
cores.... :D

~~~
lccarrasco
Hopefully I'm not missing something? 90 days ~= 3 months 2k/month*3 months ~=
6k

6k > 4k

------
epa
Although I have enjoyed watching Jack Ma's journey with Alibaba, I am very
skeptical of any self reported numbers coming out of Chinese markets. While i
believe they have enourmous volume flowing through their services, you can
never be sure how much of this is being accurately reported.

~~~
qiqing
> I am very skeptical of any self reported numbers coming out of Chinese
> markets

Would you say that you are less skeptical of large U.S.-based companies
(banks, energy, or any other sector) when self-reporting?

~~~
epa
I would say there is a greater risk of incorrect self reporting to US public
companies than Chinese public companies.

------
gojomo
Why didn't Amazon think of this?

If synthesizing such a 'holiday' for the US, my guess is that a date in June
might work best.

~~~
gregshap
Or you put it in late november and call it "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday"

~~~
surferbayarea
Black Friday is a baby in comparison - just $1.35b

~~~
gregshap
The article had 1.35b as an estimate for cyber monday online sales. Black
friday is a lot bigger overall - on the order of 50 billion for the weekend.

Of course in the US there is no single retailer capturing such a huge share of
the sales on our invented holidays. But cmon, we pretty much invented the
inventing of consumer holidays.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Retail...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_\(shopping\)#Retail_sales)

------
sdrothrock
I heard about this a few days ago and went for it, but my payment couldn't be
processed. Got an e-mail this morning telling me that because of the high
volume of sales, they had some payments failing and that I should try again...
didn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence in me as a first-time buyer.

------
desireco42
I didn't go crazy but I bought a ton of stuff on aliexpress. I buy regularily,
and I saved few items to buy today. This is huge and genuinely global event.

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bigtunacan
And yet still Alibaba's share price fell nearly another 2% today. :(

~~~
bigtunacan
Why was this down voted? Not trolling; shares of Alibaba ended down 1.99%
today at $79.81 a share.

This seems counterintuitive. Since they smashed sales records I would have
expected to see a bump in the shares at least today even if didn't translate
to the long term.

------
xoai
Does anyone know the cancel/return rate?

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svenfaw
Wow, my network monitor and firewall just went crazy on that page. Does it
really need to open more than 190 separate HTTP connections for a simple news
article (many of them to shady domains)? This is downright ridiculous.

Edit: Re-installing an ad blocker to preserve my sanity.

~~~
dang
Which of the recent URLs is the best?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=alibaba%20singles&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=alibaba%20singles&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

(One thing we want to make the HN software do is let users the link related
URLs together and identify the best one of a set.)

~~~
svenfaw
Based on a very quick check, these two fare much better:

[https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-crushes-records-
brings-14...](https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-crushes-records-
brings-143-billion-singles-day/)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940)

~~~
dang
They may be easier to load, but which has the best content? That's always the
#1 concern here.

We've changed to the BBC url for now. Previously
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/11/us-alibaba-
singles...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/11/us-alibaba-singles-day-
idUSKCN0SZ34J20151111#H3OPU2xoksD5hTyq.97).

------
ChrisArchitect
a terrifying number, hard to fathom really. Unbridled seemingly mindless
consumption

