Alibaba smashes its own $14.3 billion record in 15 hours, making it the biggest Singles' Day sales ever
UPDATE: Nov. 11, 2016, 3:54 p.m. SGT Alibaba has broken last year's sales record for Singles' Day.
China's biggest e-commerce player announced on Friday at 3:20 p.m. that it passed last year's incredible $14.3 billion sales day already.
For perspective, America's Cyber Monday sales only netted $2.68 billion last year.
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Black Friday saw a further $4.45 billion spent.
The biggest shopping bonanza in China -- and in the world, really -- started at midnight across Alibaba's online stores such as Taobao and Tmall.
Alibaba threw a huge concert to kick it off, featuring Scarlett Johansson, David Beckham, Kobe Bryant and One Republic.
Just 52 seconds in, Alibaba already cracked 1 billion yuan ($146 million) in sales.
And at the 7 minute mark, it hit its next milestone of 10 billion yuan ($1.46 billion). Absolutely mind-boggling.
From the morning's trajectory, Alibaba looked like it was well on its way to smashing last year's sale.
By the halfway mark on Friday, its sales had already reached 82.4 billion yuan ($12.1 billion).
84 percent of sales were made on mobile phones.
And if you're imagining people hunched over their computers buying frantically, that's not quite right.
84 percent of Alibaba's sales done on Friday were made via mobile phones -- unsurprising, if you take into account Alibaba's stronghold over digital payments.
The internet giant claims to have 400 million registered users of its Alipay payment service.
270 million of those are active each month, using the service for everything from meals at restaurants, to paying street vendors and of course, Singles' Day sales.
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
