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Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

nytimes.com

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Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#51

Post by voltagex_ »

geomark wrote: post #44
taobility wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More reasonable reason, the online shopping experience in China is much much better than in US. In China, if you are living some metropolis, the logistic is really faster than in US without any prime membership (normally within two days). And also the price is much cheaper compared with physical retail store. So, most people would prefer online shopping if possible.

I live in Thailand and buying from US online merchants is usually a nonstarter because of shipping costs which are often much more than the price of the item itself. When I buy something from Aliexpress it is usually free shipping, or something reasonable for heavier items. There is no Amazon here but there are a couple local versions, Lazada being one. They usually have shorter delivery times but cost more than Alie…

How long does it take for packages to get to you? In Australia I had a run of less than two weeks but it's been back up to a month recently.

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#52

Post by voltagex_ »

geomark wrote: post #39
lunaru wrote: post #4

Every year around this time we get the singles day news that yet another record has been broken. I'm going to guess it's going to be the same next year and the year after that since the Chinese middle class is growing (and adopting Western debt-driven spending). Not really a surprise. If anyone in the US wants to partake in the frenzy, I believe aliexpress is doing a Singles Day thing (using US timezone, so it hasn't…

I added a few dollars to the frenzy. Been adding items to my Aliexpress shopping cart for the last week. Mostly small electronics hobbyist items and Arduino compatible boards and sensor modules. Pulled the trigger after the 11.11 sale opened up.

Just out of interest, can you check a couple of prices on Dealextreme, Gearbest and Banggood to see if they're comparable?

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#53

Post by voltagex_ »

geomark wrote: post #45
voltagex_ wrote: post #16

Has anyone else noticed over the last 6 months or so that AliExpress isn't necessarily the cheapest anymore? Same thing happened with Amazon a few years ago.

I have not noticed, but I am interested. Where are you seeing better prices?

Banggood mainly - I've had better luck with them than Gearbest.

OzBargain.com.au also seems to like Lightinthebox, Rosegal and Zapals.

I do wonder if there's a way to go "one level up" - who supplies all these Chinese stores?

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#54

Post by geomark »

voltagex_ wrote: post #51
geomark wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Thailand and buying from US online merchants is usually a nonstarter because of shipping costs which are often much more than the price of the item itself. When I buy something from Aliexpress it is usually free shipping, or something reasonable for heavier items. There is no Amazon here but there are a couple local versions, Lazada being one. They usually have shorter delivery times but cost more than Alie…

How long does it take for packages to get to you? In Australia I had a run of less than two weeks but it's been back up to a month recently.

It varies a lot. Sometimes 2 weeks, more often 3 to 4. Currently a number of items seem overdue at more than 5 weeks.

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#55

Post by adventured »

quicklime wrote: post #50

The Alibaba Group's revenue for the entire 2017 was ~$23B (see https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BABA/financials?p=BABA ), so making $18B in a single day sounds unbelievable. Is one of these numbers incorrect?

They're both correct. Alibaba makes almost all of its money from advertising.

They're frequently incorrectly portrayed as a traditional retailer, akin to Amazon (which itself is increasingly not a retailer).

They're a retailer in the sense that eBay is. They own no merchandise, they sell no merchandise. They're a platform that other people sell on/through. They don't primarily make money from listing fees though (as eBay does), in their case it's from ads and equivalent. Alibaba has a lot more in common with Google than Walmart (which is also why their profit margins are so high, versus eg JD.com).

Incredibly, when Alibaba was founded, China's GDP was ~1/11th what it is today. Which is another way of saying, they were dramatically poorer just 18 years ago. That factor combined with non-existent online micro charging capabilities circa 1999, no smartphones, etc. meant that Jack Ma couldn't easily charge traditional listing/selling fees to be on their platform. So they went with a mostly free platform that made money via ads. That is also a big reason eBay failed in China despite being there semi-early:

(story from 2010 about what happened to eBay in China) https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/09/12/how-ebay-faile...

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#56

Post by voltagex_ »

geomark wrote: post #45
voltagex_ wrote: post #16

Has anyone else noticed over the last 6 months or so that AliExpress isn't necessarily the cheapest anymore? Same thing happened with Amazon a few years ago.

I have not noticed, but I am interested. Where are you seeing better prices?

I also found the following aggregators/search engines:

https://en.pandacheck.com/

https://sealsmile.com/

http://chinaprices.us/

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#57

Post by geomark »

voltagex_ wrote: post #52
geomark wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added a few dollars to the frenzy. Been adding items to my Aliexpress shopping cart for the last week. Mostly small electronics hobbyist items and Arduino compatible boards and sensor modules. Pulled the trigger after the 11.11 sale opened up.

Just out of interest, can you check a couple of prices on Dealextreme, Gearbest and Banggood to see if they're comparable?

Among the items I ordered today:

HC-06: Dealextreme $5.50, Banggood $5.99, Gearbest $6.57, Aliexpress $2.58

Arduino Nano v3.0: Dealextreme $3.46, Banggood $2.77, Gearbest $4.27, Aliexpress $1.66

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#58

Post by geomark »

voltagex_ wrote: post #53
geomark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not noticed, but I am interested. Where are you seeing better prices?

Banggood mainly - I've had better luck with them than Gearbest. OzBargain.com.au also seems to like Lightinthebox, Rosegal and Zapals. I do wonder if there's a way to go "one level up" - who supplies all these Chinese stores?

I think you have to go there yourself. Watch some of the videos by Bunnie Huang to see how. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXNv_rNGcc

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#59

Post by adventured »

djsumdog wrote: post #2

With Alibaba launching their own hosting services as well, where do they stand at scale compared to Amazon? I realize Alibaba is mostly targeted inward to China, unlike Amazon that has some international markets, but are they a contender when it comes to global sales (and possibly China facing hosting?)

According to Bloomberg, Alibaba hit $675 million in sales for their cloud services for fiscal 2016. So they're likely comparable, or a bit larger than, Google presently (~1/2 the size of Azure and far behind AWS).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-10/microsoft...

Re: Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours

#60

Post by voltagex_ »

geomark wrote: post #57
voltagex_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of interest, can you check a couple of prices on Dealextreme, Gearbest and Banggood to see if they're comparable?

Among the items I ordered today: HC-06: Dealextreme $5.50, Banggood $5.99, Gearbest $6.57, Aliexpress $2.58 Arduino Nano v3.0: Dealextreme $3.46, Banggood $2.77, Gearbest $4.27, Aliexpress $1.66

Wow! I haven't seen that kind of differential for a while. I wonder if it's just because of 11.11
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