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Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

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Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#61
post #57

Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.

If it's small and sent by ePacket (assuming you are in the US), then it will arrive fairly quickly

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.

Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld. Unless I'm missing something.

tmall.hk is Taobao, OP is saying he manages IT for an account based in Germany on tmall.hk

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#63
post #57

Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.

Aliexpress is US-based sellers with US-based warehousing so you get it directly in the US. The better deals are on alibaba outright for Chinese consumers.

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#64

Some 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 diffe…

> 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.

I visited Alibaba HQ last month. People seemed pretty worked and driven by deadlines which can decrease their code quality. The teams I talked to didn't do much testing.

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.

Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld. Unless I'm missing something.

I think they are implying that the domain name and site are localized for the region.

For example: ebay.com,ebay.com.hk amazon.com,amazon.com.hk tmall.com,tmall.hk

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.

This is an extraordinary claim, can you back this up in some way? I'm not from Italy or France so it isn't common knowledge to me.

A lot of dirty tricks are played by exploiting the rules of origin. You can mark something as "Made in Italy" if the last substantial transformation of the goods occurred there. Last substantial transformation is very poorly defined, so is open to creative interpretation. You can make 95% of a handbag in China or Bangladesh, do some final stitching in Italy and perfectly legally label it as "made in Italy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_origin

The inverse manipulation is used by Pakistani manufacturers of surgical instruments. They buy stamped steel blanks from Germany, perform the labour-intensive grinding and sharpening in Pakistan, then label the instruments as "Made in Germany" by claiming that they did not undergo substantial transformation in Pakistan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaTWtz1AzPE

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#67

I wonder how they avoid getting DDOSed to hell and back during their big sale week? You would think the DDOS extortion groups would be all over that.

All of China hitting your servers aren't considered a DDOS by itself?

If they're buying stuff then it's not a DDOS. If it's millions of garbage IoT devices hitting your servers and running whatever the most expensive (CPU/Memory/IO wise) queries constantly then yes, that's a DDOS.

The DDOS extortion guys are getting really good at their job. They even broke Akamai a few weeks ago. It's a spiral where they extort money and use it to improve their infrastructure to be able to extort bigger and bigger players. I have zero doubt that Alibabba's servers were already straining under the load of that many shoppers. Adding a DDOS on top of that would be catastrophic.

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent comment's question is still there. Why does the site have an HK tld. Unless I'm missing something.

tmall.hk is Taobao, OP is saying he manages IT for an account based in Germany on tmall.hk

Ah yeah that's what I missed. Thanks

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#69
post #57

Frankly I'm extraordinarily disappointed. I went to aliexpress.com and I don't see anything in their "Today's Deals" that looks anything like a deal. Add in the fact that I'd have to wait who knows how long for shipping and deal with them for an international return and I'd rather buy locally.

It has a huge timer in the front page stating that the deals starts in about 11 hours from now.

Re: Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

#70
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious; why would a german webshop have hong kong tld?

tmall is a website like amazon or ebay where sellers can setup a shop and sell to consumers.

Exactly, sorry - should have explained this. While aliexpress etc. are similar to Amazon marketplace, the tmall.hk site is geared towards trusted, foreign brands and big shops. You can setup a very distinctively looking shop, maintain your brand and standing out completely from the surrounding hosting site.

You are not allowed to open a tmall.hk shop unless you are a globally recognized brand or a shop that makes at least xx million € of revenue a year, its more or less invite only. Its a premium platform.

The reason Alibaba did this is that chinese people don't trust their own brands and shops, so for certain goods where safety is important and luxury goods they flock to foreign brands.

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