Alibaba Singles’ Day Takes Digital Commerce To A Whole New Level. But At What Cost?

The winner takes it all. A well-known phrase which is certainly on top of mind with the big global commerce players. Where companies like Amazon started leveraging their American sales volume into loyalty programs like Prime and online sale campaigns like Prime Day. This weekend, the China based company Alibaba, crushed all other players and took commerce to a whole new level.

Promoting their mainly local (!) online sales event Singles’ Day, with a huge media event with big stars like Nicole Kidman and Pharrell Williams, Alibaba produced a staggering online sales of 25.3 billion dollar in just one day. To Alibaba and at least 82 brands participating, like Nike, a great success. No wonder they’re planning to make this a huge global event. Can you even imagine?

Interesting to know is that 90 percent of all the transaction of Singles’ Day were made on a mobile phone. At some point there were 256.000 transactions per second. The event will boost the total online year sales by 30 percent financial analysts say.

While some local players, like Bol.com in The Netherlands, try to profit too by introducing discounts on the same day, I strongly believe that such a huge shift of revenue streams and concentration of money, leaves less and less room for competition. In the end this this will have some sort of negative impact on local economics and on societies as well. At some point governments will have to act. What are your thoughts?