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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

#71

Post by hueving »

iamthepieman wrote: post #23
hueving wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.001 of a years worth of minutes is 525 minutes (.001 * 525600) or about 8 hours and 40 minutes. If all of that time just so happened to occur on the $1B day then that's 356 million. Of course this is back of the napkin. That $1B is not evenly distributed throughout the day and especially in high availability systems the .001 downtime is many small outages over the entire infrastructure and not the entire apparatus c…

No, my point is that 99.999% uptime has to be scoped to the same timeline as your window that you're measuring. If you're focusing on availability for a single day, then achieving 99.999% availability for that day means less than a second of downtime.

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

#72

Post by OrdaGarb »

alaskamiller wrote: post #63
Steeeve wrote: 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.

Of my 140 orders over the last two years on Aliexpress, only one has been originated in the US (California, to be exact). All but a few of the remainder were from China. I reside in Colorado. Mostly I buy hobby electronic components, chemicals/substances, and the occasional household or automotive item.

I've used Alibaba.com as well, but the payment methods are far different and it's a more risky situation with fewer guarantees. That service I use for high-value orders after a thorough vetting of the seller. Mostly commodity items like a pallet of green coffee beans, or weird chemicals in unusual quantities.

Sometimes an order on Aliexpress will be large enough that I must consider negotiating with someone on Alibaba.com instead. Negotiations happen for me on Aliexpress as well, but the sellers on Alibaba.com seem to have greater latitude in not only price, but also packing, shipping, and handling to destination.

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

#73

Post by voltagex_ »

dodgedcactii wrote: post #17
miguelrochefort wrote: post #5

I'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?

Aren't GeekBuying just sourcing from Alibaba anyway?

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

#74

Post by Hanks10100 »

brandur wrote: post #16

An 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 inf…

Weex is a framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI. https://alibaba.github.io/weex

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

#75

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

ngokevin wrote: post #64
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #15

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.

That figures. China (Bejing) is 7 hours ahead of german time, yet I've noticed that my Tmall contacts are replying to messages when it is really late at night for them, sometimes excusing themselves that they have dinner right now. On 11.11 many are on duty for 24 hours.

Off topic, but in contrast to americans, german people are often frowning and complaining a lot - even though we really don't have much cause, in comparison. Friendliness and positivity are some of the things I really appreciate about the USA. Treasure it!

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

#76

Post by miguelrochefort »

criddell wrote: post #39
miguelrochefort wrote: post #5

I'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 country are you in? How long are the shipping times for you?

> What country are you in?

Canada.

> How long are the shipping times for you?

Very long, but I'm not in a hurry. Between 2 weeks and 2 months.

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

#77

Post by baybal2 »

digi_owl wrote: post #44
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things are made in what China calls "Special Export Zones" (SEZs). This is for goods that require lots of imported machinery and components to make, which are basically brought into the zones duty free. But as a consequence, what is made in these zones can only be exported. So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Bes…

I seem to recall that before HK was turned over to China, HK companies would do all but the most final of assemblies in China and then ship it across the border so they could be sold as "made in Hong Kong". And this is how Shenzen go so massive, as it is right up stream from HK.

And Singapore as well before they turned from a city state to a city offshore bank. They exploited their WTO membership.

Most of operations were ran like that: company imports loose goods from China at few pennies, and puts in "value" into them, most of the times just packaging with writing in English that was supposed to "cost" few dollars each, but of course the packaging was made in China for less than a penny each. This also allowed the Sg intermediary to claim expense on the stuff, reducing effective tax to single digits.

Those were golden times.

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

#78

Post by baybal2 »

laurentdc wrote: post #10
kogepathic wrote: post #3

> and a weakening yuan may curb enthusiasm for foreign wares. I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands) Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)

> 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.

>underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France

Believe me or no. Italian effective tax rate for a factory business is less than that in China.

Most Italian shoe and fashion goods factories in Italy are owned by Chinese these days.

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

#80

Post by hncommenter13 »

Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github here[1] and here[2].

There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software.

Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail.

[1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase

[2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5

[3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf

Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)

I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form.

There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase

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