People were too busy shopping on Singles' Day to eat
China's Singles' Day, which has become the world's biggest shopping festival, is proving too much for some sale hunters to handle.
With slashed prices across the country for both offline and online retailers, it's easy to see how you could get caught up in the bonanza.
A user, posting pretty similar WeChat messages from two friends, showed screenshots of them begging her to bring some food to them. It seems they were both too busy shopping to head out to get food for themselves.
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Another user, posting a screenshot of his online shopping cart, said: "我的双11战果，接下来的日子土都吃不起了." (This is fruit of my Singles' Day labour, I won't even be able to afford dirt for a while.)
Another user said: "双11就是烧钱." (Singles' Day is for burning money.)
3/4 of Taobao's mobile users are under 35
Alibaba told Mashable via email that 75 percent of its app's users are under 35, and that users open the Taobao app seven times, on average, each day.
The country's biggest e-commerce player smashed past last year's sales record of $14.3 billion by the 15-hour mark on Friday afternoon.
Alibaba wasn't the only winner in the Singles' Day sale.
Another e-commerce player, JD.com, said its orders surpassed last year's entire Singles' Day takings before 2 p.m.
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People in Southeast Asia shopped at work
The Singles' Day frenzy wasn't isolated to China. In other countries around Asia, there was a sharp spike in shoppers jumping on websites participating in the sale, according to Shopback, a shopping rebate site.
It said it experienced a 14-fold increase in traffic at midnight on Friday, when sales began.
And it seems lots of people were shopping at work on Friday, its spokesperson added. Traffic from Southeast Asia was seven times higher than usual during work hours.
While Alibaba's sites Taobao and Tmall were the top hit, other non-Chinese sites such as ASOS and Lazada received a surge of traffic in response to their Singles' Day campaigns, she said.
The Singles' Day sale initially started as an anti-Valentine's Day celebration, because Nov. 11, or 11-11, look like a group of single people.
Retailers started jumping on the day around a decade ago, and as e-commerce started becoming more popular in recent years, companies like Alibaba and JD have come out winners on the day of treating yourself.
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
