This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.
Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
11–20 of 96 posts
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#12They are using weex https://github.com/alibaba/weex
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#13This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.
What? $1B over a day vs $1B over a year is the same with regard to 99.999%.
If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#14I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive. I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival). On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap microcontrollers and what not.
YES!! You can buy just an egregious amount of (crappy) components for very little money. As a wannabe-inventor that burns through a lot of components, this is really one of my favorite things about it.
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#15Some background info: I'm tech lead for a german shop on tmall.hk, and indeed this time, the numbers are crazy.
What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals.
The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it.
On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#16An article on how Alibaba subsidiaries are using a backend stack based on Spring:
https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]).
I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale.
[1] https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#17I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive. I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival). On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
What about for small electronics like stuff I'd get from geekbuying?
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#18This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.
That's just a $10K loss.
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#19I've been very impressed by AliExpress, and ordered over 50 different things in just the past year. My experience has been nothing but positive. I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival). On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
I love alibaba/aliexpress, it's like "China: The Website". Great for cheap microcontrollers and what not.
Just as an example what taobao is so neat for,
Temperature Controlled Outlet 33.3 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.t80P3i&id=536295296729&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3200881016743
Water Heater 19.9 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.MjQ88E&id=527717128601&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3219050495205
Aquarium Wave Maker 15.9 RMB https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.47.Wgm0TD&id=533814521124&ns=1&abbucket=4#detail
50 L Plastic Box 35.0 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.haJnJy&id=530500415822&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&sku_properties=21433:648878820
Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
#20This is one instance where 99.999% reliability doesn't really cut it.
What? $1B over a day vs $1B over a year is the same with regard to 99.999%. If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
I think his point is if you're making $1B a day vs $1B in a year downtime suddenly becomes much more costly for you