Lazada outsold its 2016 Singles' Day record by 3 times
If you hadn't heard, Saturday's Singles' Day sale in China absolutely smashed last year's already phenomenal record, bringing in $25 billion in a day on a single shopping site — Alibaba Taobao.
Over in Southeast Asia, a quieter storm is brewing, but it's an important indicator of a market that's rapidly embracing ecommerce.
Lazada — incidentally majority owned by Alibaba — is of the more popular ecommerce sites that sells across the region comprising countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Saturday's sale netted Lazada a pretty respectable $123 million in sales, or 6.5 million items, nearly three times last year's performance.
Lazada also noted that more than 70 percent of orders were done on mobile phones, which many in the region's emerging markets use as their main internet devices, as opposed to desktops.
Lazada's Thailand warehouse
Lazada is Alibaba's early dibs on a young and keen market.
This figure was corroborated by commerce tech firm Criteo, which said about 75 percent of transactions went through mobiles, with most of those in apps.
Criteo also said that Singles' Day sales volume across the region, which includes Lazada, outperformed last year by more than double.
It's easy to dismiss Lazada's $123 million, given that it's less than one percent of Taobao's big day in China by comparison. But considering the shopping holiday is nowhere near the cultural phenomenon it is in China, and that nearly no retailers offline contributed to the buzz, the new record reached shows more people are used to buying online.
Hootsuite data shows internet penetration in Southeast Asia is just over half now, with 80 million new users coming on in 2016, at a growth rate of 30 percent.
Alibaba spotted the region's potential, and injected another $1 billion into Lazada in June this year, to now own 83 percent of the company.
As internet penetration and middle class affluence rises in many of the region's populous countries, Alibaba is primed to unlock its next big market outside of its home base.
Topics Black Friday
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
