Though it’s been more than a week from the day of Nov. 11, or as the day is popularly known as, Singles’ Day, people are still talking about it. Instead of asking “what did you do”, they started the conversation by directly asking “what did you buy on Singles’ Day”. This entertaining festival widespread among young Chinese people to celebrate their pride as a single has now become the most popular online shopping day of the year. Not just open to single people, almost everyone is celebrating Singles’ Day by playing the role of the insane consumer.One of the large consumer groups is college students. “We’ve received more than 300 packages today”, said Amanda Gao, the full-time staff at New York University Shanghai Resource Center on the second day after Singles’ Day. The packages they received on Nov. 13 reached the maximum of the semester and the average number of packages the Resource Center receives is around 100. Foreseeing the excessive packages arriving situation, the Resource Center prepared for the “battle” a few days before Nov. 11 by changing the room layout to create more space for packages as well as adding one more reception desk, however, they are still running out space and working like crazy. The common space where students used to stay has now been occupied with piles of packages. “The ‘battle’ won’t end until the end of the month of November”, said Amanda, she experienced exactly the same thing last year as well.

(Data from NYU Shanghai Resource Center from Oct. 23 to Nov. 21, 2015)

(Photo of the Resource Center common space, taken by Myra Liu two days after Singles’ Day.) In 2009, the Chinese online shopping mall Taobao sold fifty million RMB goods on Nov 11, the first ever 11.11 online shopping day. Six years later, Alibaba group releases the data that at 00:01:12 a.m. on Nov 11 2015, only 72 seconds from the beginning of the 11.11 shopping festival, the total gross merchandise volume has exceeded RMB 1 billion. At 07:45:42 a.m., total GMV has exceeded RMB 41.7 billion and has surpassed the online total sales value of Black Friday in the United States last year. At the end of the day, the total GMV is RMB 91.217 billion and all this happened within only one day. Nevertheless, this is only the data released from Alibaba group, but Singles’ Day has created plenty of opportunities for thousands of companies, including other Chinese online retailing companies, restaurants and the entertainment industry, for example karaoke and movie theatres. Alibaba says that the success of 11.11 shopping festival is not only the success of a single company or a single industry but is the success of the reform of business as well as the Chinese new economy as a whole. It manifests the possibility that everyone participates in the economy and how strong it could be. Meanwhile, there are voices doubting the sustainability of the prosperous online business as well as how many more 11.11 shopping festival we will have in the future. With all the great achievements Singles' Day has brought, how much more progress is the online retailing industry able to achieve? It is a question remains for time to prove. This article was written by Shari Yao. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Myra Liu and the NYU Shanghai Resource Center.