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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

#81

Post by bigiain »

hueving wrote: post #71
iamthepieman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.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.

I don't even monitor for sub-second downtime... A sub 500ms glitch would very likely go unnoticed on most of my production platforms. @$1B/5mins, that could represent ~$1.5million in (potentially) lost sales...

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

#82

Post by brazzledazzle »

striking wrote: post #54
nsomaru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's called DoS when the traffic is legitimate

Yeah, there's no Denial of Service there. Just service.

There might be a DOS but it's not an attack. It's easier to leave off the the "attack" in "DDOS attack" so it's implied but without it the meaning changes.

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

#83

Post by ngokevin »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #75
ngokevin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

> On 11.11 many are on duty for 24 hours.

For sure, Alibaba is working all hands on deck and burning the midnight oil right now.

And yeah, I hope the nation can continue being positive and empathetic, and even grow more friendly in that regard.

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

#84

Post by est »

NKCSS wrote: post #53
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…

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

I think it's because tmall.com was overwhelmed by Chinese brands.

Chinese people usually think HK stuff was more wester like, so a .hk tld stands for foreign goods.

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

#85

Post by zoom6628 »

I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled.

I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.

Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.

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

#86

Post by kimshibal »

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).

AliExpress is small compare to Tmall/taobao

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

#87

Post by pvlbdn »

zoom6628 wrote: post #85

I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents…

Exactly my story last night. 9 out of 10 transactions failed.

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

#88

Post by ehsanu1 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #55
laurentdc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gucci, Prada, Moncler at least. This kind of stuff was covered by the national TV for a while but no one seems to care anymore. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly... http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-... http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prad... (couldn't find an english version of this one, sorry) "Sold to Gucci for €24 euros each (around $28.…

Gucci, Prada, and Moncler are at best "middle tier luxury" brands. Almost everyone knows they are completely/partially made in China.

Sorry, but we're the 99.999%.

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

#90

Post by richardhawthorn »

It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly the price I was seeing last week.

I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying.

Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.

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