
Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day - fmihaila
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/alibaba-posts-1-billion-in-sales-in-5-minutes-on-singles-day
======
zoom6628
I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to
tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and
just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick
in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it-
lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but
at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled.

I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative
guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen
times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was
already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about
00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days
the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And
in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high
that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each
group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32
floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple
companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.

Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.

~~~
pvlbdn
Exactly my story last night. 9 out of 10 transactions failed.

------
MrBuddyCasino
Some background info: I'm tech lead for a german shop on tmall.hk, and indeed
this time, the numbers are crazy.

What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely
promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on
promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special
deals.

The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of
different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use
during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your
margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it.

On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the
result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't
know how they manage to maintain it.

~~~
NKCSS
Just curious; why would a german webshop have hong kong tld?

~~~
wodenokoto
tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell
to consumers.

~~~
skinnymuch
Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld.
Unless I'm missing something.

~~~
alaskamiller
tmall.hk is Taobao, OP is saying he manages IT for an account based in Germany
on tmall.hk

~~~
skinnymuch
Ah yeah that's what I missed. Thanks

------
hncommenter13
Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-
developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github
here[1] and here[2].

There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I
haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this
software.

Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more
technical detail.

[1]
[https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase](https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase)

[2]
[https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5](https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5)

[3]
[http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf](http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf)

Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of
these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic
papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)

I've accessed this
[[http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7_2)]
but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form.

There are a bunch of references here, but not in English:
[http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase](http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase)

------
brandur
An article on how Alibaba subsidiaries are using a backend stack based on
Spring:

[https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-
alib...](https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-
group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/)

The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open
source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they
moved to GitHub [2]).

I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find
surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If
anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be
interested to hear about running software at that scale.

[1] [https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-
alib...](https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-
group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/)

[2] [https://github.com/alibaba](https://github.com/alibaba)

~~~
Hanks10100
Weex is one of those technologies. It was running on TaoBao app actually.

[https://github.com/alibaba/weex](https://github.com/alibaba/weex)

------
madmax108
I work at a young company providing search as a service for multiple
medium/big e-commerce sites (mostly those which don't have their own search
teams) and 11/11 is indeed a crazy day. It's funny how till 2 years ago, Cyber
Monday was the big event we looked at and we noticed major traffic spikes last
year on veteran's day (11/11) only to later realize that this was in fact
singles' day!

This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected
again! :)

------
miguelrochefort
I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things
in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive.

I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's
Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival).

On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any
shopping app I've used before).

~~~
wcummings
I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap
microcontrollers and what not.

~~~
fapjacks
YES!! You can buy just an egregious amount of (crappy) components for very
little money. As a wannabe-inventor that burns through a lot of components,
this is really one of my favorite things about it.

~~~
Freak_NL
It's great for amateur electronics projects. Need 100 22AWG five-strand
connectors and you're not in a rush? Hit up AliExpress, and they'll show up on
your doorstep for less than the price of a frozen pizza in a few weeks.

------
andr
This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.

~~~
hueving
What? $1B over a day vs $1B over a year is the same with regard to 99.999%.

If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of
downtime.

~~~
iamthepieman
.001 of a years worth of minutes is 525 minutes (.001 * 525600) or about 8
hours and 40 minutes. If all of that time just so happened to occur on the $1B
day then that's 356 million. Of course this is back of the napkin. That $1B is
not evenly distributed throughout the day and especially in high availability
systems the .001 downtime is many small outages over the entire infrastructure
and not the entire apparatus crashing all at once. Though because load can be
a factor in downtime, they are not completely without correlation.

~~~
hueving
No, my point is that 99.999% uptime has to be scoped to the same timeline as
your window that you're measuring. If you're focusing on availability for a
single day, then achieving 99.999% availability for that day means less than a
second of downtime.

~~~
bigiain
I don't even monitor for sub-second downtime... A sub 500ms glitch would very
likely go unnoticed on most of my production platforms. @$1B/5mins, that could
represent ~$1.5million in (potentially) lost sales...

------
kogepathic
> and a weakening yuan may curb enthusiasm for foreign wares.

I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east
Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands)

Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically
find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of
clothing or electronics)

~~~
laurentdc
> Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at
> you, fashion brands)

They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by
underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in
$country" logo on the final product.

~~~
linkregister
This is an extraordinary claim, can you back this up in some way? I'm not from
Italy or France so it isn't common knowledge to me.

~~~
laurentdc
Gucci, Prada, Moncler at least. This kind of stuff was covered by the national
TV for a while but no one seems to care anymore.

[http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-
madeinitaly...](http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-
madeinitaly20)

[http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-
and-...](http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-the-
chinese-workers)

[http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-
prad...](http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prada-
moncler-il-tempo-dello-sfruttamento-e-la-sostanza-del-valore/) (couldn't find
an english version of this one, sorry)

"Sold to Gucci for €24 euros each (around $28.09) despite a retail rate of
$1000, Aroldo Guidotti of the subcontractor, leather goods specialist Mondo
Libero, was filmed discussing the cost saving strategy of replacing Italian
workers with Chinese nationals, who are hired as part-time employees, and yet
work more hours than those on a full-time contract."

~~~
tsunamifury
Gucci, Prada, and Moncler are at best "middle tier luxury" brands. Almost
everyone knows they are completely/partially made in China.

~~~
ehsanu1
Sorry, but we're the 99.999%.

------
Hanks10100
They are using weex
[https://github.com/alibaba/weex](https://github.com/alibaba/weex)

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
I know weex is being worked on by alibaba but is it actually confirmed that
the live app is using this?

~~~
Hanks10100
Yes, I confirmed that.

------
marban
"Alibaba, Amid Intense Hype, Confronts a Slowdown on Singles Day"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/ali...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/business/international/alibaba-
singles-day-slowdown.html)

------
wenbin
Check out Alibaba's 2012 tech stack & how they prepared for 11.11 :)
[https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-
tmall](https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/interview-taobao-tmall)

------
jandrese
I wonder how they avoid getting DDOSed to hell and back during their big sale
week? You would think the DDOS extortion groups would be all over that.

~~~
ngokevin
All of China hitting your servers aren't considered a DDOS by itself?

~~~
nsomaru
Not sure it's called DoS when the traffic is legitimate

~~~
striking
Yeah, there's no Denial of Service there. Just service.

~~~
brazzledazzle
There might be a DOS but it's not an attack. It's easier to leave off the the
"attack" in "DDOS attack" so it's implied but without it the meaning changes.

------
richardhawthorn
It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so
they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly
the price I was seeing last week.

I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed
to buying.

Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until
3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.

------
baybal2
Ma tried to get to the West with B2C really really hard, but only got burned
with the 10 Main fad store, a wasted office lease, and around $100m. wasted on
online ads alone.

Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent
zero on ads.

------
ensiferum
_sigh_ and all that plastic crap just ends up in the landfill (ocean) half a
year later.

Instead we should have a "buy nothing day" that'd get celebrated for its 0$
sales.

------
pman2000
These numbers are absolutely sick...

I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!

------
adgulacti
retail type of bullshit, literally. stuffing all the sale into a single day
when none of the physical or non-physical systems are designed or implemented
to meet such peak demand. my current company does everything to eliminate such
peaks, which makes sense considering customer satisfaction (service quality)
and cost efficiency, and some guys like alibaba doing the opposite. nothing
but marketing scam, prices getting bloated in the day before and discounts(?)
exclusive to 11.11.

------
danvoell
If I go to the site aliexpress.com it looks like the deals don't start for
another 12 hours. Are there different launch times for the sales?

~~~
hawkice
Singles' Day is Nov 11 (11/11), so I'm guessing you're in Pacific time zone?
The big splash was when the sale started in China, which is quite a few hours
ahead of the US.

------
rasz_pl
1 Aliexpress thinks Im in russia

2 Aliexpress.com tries to make tons of UDP connections, WebRTC? (unable to
disable in desktop chrome)

------
KaoruAoiShiho
I heard that last year some pre orders were counted towards the singles' day
tally. Is that accounted for?

~~~
nostromo
That's addressed in the last three paragraphs of the article.

------
tonosari
It's the new Black Friday in China

------
gigatexal
Isn't there an ongoing concern that a lot of what is sold on alibaba is
counterfeit?

------
Steeeve
Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't
see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in
the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with
them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.

~~~
alaskamiller
Aliexpress is US-based sellers with US-based warehousing so you get it
directly in the US. The better deals are on alibaba outright for Chinese
consumers.

~~~
OrdaGarb
Of my 140 orders over the last two years on Aliexpress, only one has been
originated in the US (California, to be exact). All but a few of the remainder
were from China. I reside in Colorado. Mostly I buy hobby electronic
components, chemicals/substances, and the occasional household or automotive
item.

I've used Alibaba.com as well, but the payment methods are far different and
it's a more risky situation with fewer guarantees. That service I use for
high-value orders after a thorough vetting of the seller. Mostly commodity
items like a pallet of green coffee beans, or weird chemicals in unusual
quantities.

Sometimes an order on Aliexpress will be large enough that I must consider
negotiating with someone on Alibaba.com instead. Negotiations happen for me on
Aliexpress as well, but the sellers on Alibaba.com seem to have greater
latitude in not only price, but also packing, shipping, and handling to
destination.

