Singles' Day

Singles' Day falls on November 11 (11/11, four ones, hence singles). It began in the 1990s as a tongue-in-cheek anti-Valentine's celebration among Chinese university students. In 2009, Alibaba repurposed it as an online sales event on TaobaoAlibaba's vast consumer marketplace, founded in 2003, where millions of merchants sell essentially everything and much of Chinese online shopping culture was invented. and Tmall, and it grew into the biggest shopping festival on the planet, dwarfing Black Friday and Cyber Monday in gross merchandise volume.

The festival is now a weeks-long season of presales, coupons, livestream selling, and complex discount math that shoppers complain about and participate in anyway. Every major platform, including JD.comChina's second-largest e-commerce company, built on self-operated inventory and its own logistics network, with a reputation for authentic goods and same-day delivery., PinduoduoThe price-first e-commerce platform that rose on group buying and farm-direct goods to challenge Alibaba and JD, and the parent of the international app Temu., and DouyinByteDance's Chinese version of the short-video app known internationally as TikTok, run as a separate product with its own content and e-commerce ecosystem., runs its own version.

For UnboxChina readers, Singles' Day matters because it is where new Chinese brands and product trends often debut at scale, and its sales rankings are a useful map of what Chinese consumers actually want.