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Singles Day VS Black Friday, Spoiler Alert: It is not even close!

Though in Western Culture Black Friday considered to be a celebration for shoppers and retailers, let us expose you to a day in even a larger scale, it is coming and going to be bigger than ever!

Some of you might have heard about Singles Day, some of you not but on the 11th of November China is celebrating a huge shopping festival. “Singles Day” got its name for its date, 11.11 - four times one, the day of the single people.

Apparently originated from a group of students, in the beginning, it was simply a day that single people would go out more than usual and celebrate their bachelor/bachelorette life. However, when you have Alibaba around, nothing is going to stay simple, I guess. 11.11 the singles day became a shopping spree.

Around 2008 the E-commerce in China started to have significant growth, and the platform, mostly TaoBao noticed that people buy more on 11.11. They assumed that all the single people felt bad on Singles Day and went online shopping to make themselves feel better (being alone at a certain age in China is a big issue). Alibaba saw this as an opportunity and made all the biggest stores in TaoBao and T-mall to go with huge promotions for the Singles Day. It was an enormous success, and with every year it became stronger.

The initial thought of Alibaba was to ride on this trend and create their equivalent to the famous Black Friday. China has equivalent versions for a lot of foreign things, such as youku.com which is similar to YouTube, Baidu (a search engine) or WeChat which resembles WhatsUp. Nevertheless, the singles day became a phenomenon while the sales growth to an eye-popping scale.

It started to grow in 2009 and last year on 2016 the sales in this 24 hours of 11.11 reached 17.8 Billion Dollars! Just for the comparison, Black Friday last year’s online sales reached 3.35 Billion Dollars.mSingles day’s online sales reach in 24 hours the approximate amount of sales that E-bay reaches in an entire year!

In this 24 hours festival, all the online stores in all platforms enjoy a jump in sales, and all the stores go with big promotions of 70% 80% and 90% off.

It is defiantly a good day for the consumers and of course also for the sellers.

Tamir Nahmias is an International Business Development Manager and Co-Founder of ICBB group.

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