China's Alibaba breaks Singles Day sales record


Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced early Monday that it set another sales record on its Nov. 11 Singles Day promotion, the world's biggest shopping holiday of the year. Alibaba said it sold $30.8 billion worth of goods, easily beating last year's $25.3 billion Singles Day total.
Singles Day sales have grown in recent years to exceed those racked up in the U.S. during the whole of Thanksgiving week, Yahoo Finance reports. Despite the big number, Singles Day sales growth slowed in its 10th year, falling to 27 percent from 39 percent in 2017. Shoppers ordered more than 1 billion packages from 180,000 brands on Alibaba and its affiliated services.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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