HANGZHOU, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- China's Singles' Day, a shopping event akin to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States, was first designed by Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall on Nov. 11 in 2009. Over the past decade, the online shopping event has developed from a domestic online sales promotion to a global shopping carnival.
The following facts and figures offer a glimpse into this year's shopping frenzy:
-- Sales of Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall hit 10 billion yuan (about 1.43 billion U.S. dollars) at just one minute and 36 seconds into Monday.
-- One hour, three minutes and 59 seconds after midnight, it surpassed 100 billion yuan.
-- At one hour, 26 minutes and seven seconds after midnight, sales on Tmall hit 120.7 billion yuan, exceeding the total sales on Singles' Day in 2016.
-- It only took 14 hours 21 minutes and 27 seconds to hit 200 billion yuan, eight hours less than last year.
-- At 16:31, sales of Tmall exceeded 213.5 billion yuan, surpassing last year's total sales.
-- Alibaba's "Double 11" orders peaked at 544,000 orders per second, setting a new record.
-- During the first Singles' Day shopping festival in 2009, only 27 brands participated. This year, more than 220,000 brands from over 200 countries and regions participated in this year's shopping spree.
-- More than 10 million items were available for purchase during the shopping festival on Tmall this year.
-- More than 100,000 online shops provided a live broadcast for consumer interaction.
-- TMall's livestreaming sector surpassed 10 billion yuan in just nine hours.
-- Nearly 1,000 foreign cyber celebrities broadcasted live on Tmall in different languages to boost global consumption.
-- JD.com, another Chinese online retail platform, reported cumulative sales of 165.8 billion yuan since Nov. 1 as of 9 a.m. Monday.
-- China's State Post Bureau said a total of 2.8 billion packages are expected to be handled from Nov. 11 to 18.
