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Today's online shopping spree tops 'Cyber Monday'

“HAVE you bought anything today?” could be the new greeting today as hundreds of thousands of consumers rushed to online shopping sites to buy clothes, furniture, home decoration items and even to subscribe to asset management products as part of the biggest online shopping spree of the year.

It took only 9 hours for the total of transactions at Tmall and Taobao, the consumer-oriented sites affiliated with Alibaba Group, to exceed that of the “Cyber Monday,” a similar online shopping event in the US last year, as 50 percent discounts were promised for all kinds of products offered by 20,000 vendors at the e-commerce giant’s annual shopping spree.

This was also way ahead of Shanghai retailers’ total transaction size of 6.9 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) during the seven-day National Day holiday in October of this year.

Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States, and last year it recorded US$1.5 billion in sales on November 26. This year it will take place on December 2.

As of 10am, the total payment volume for today’s spree reached 15 billion yuan.

System glitches occasionally still occurred in the first 10 minutes after midnight today, when a large number of payment requests were processed by Alipay, the payment unit of Alibaba Group. Notices such as, “There are too many people at the cashier’s desk, please wait a moment for your payment result,” showed from time to time.

Some of the popular products were sold out only minutes after midnight. Jenny Dong, a Shanghai office worker, was lucky to have successfully grabbed a round-trip ticket from Shanghai to Sydney for 4,700 yuan, a 30 percent discount off the normal price.

“The discount price was so attractive since I’ve been longing for a vacation to Australia and I was so excited to successfully put in the order the second after midnight,” she said.

The state-backed China Internet Network Information Center estimated that more than 240 million web users would take part in the commercial bonanza this year, and the transaction size at major shopping sites including 360Buy, Amazon.cn and 51Buy.com could reach 77 billion yuan.

In an online survey launched by CTR Market Research Co among 7,117 domestic web users, 73 percent said they will buy from online vendors this year, and those who are willing to buy are estimated to spend an average of 1,078 yuan, 68 yuan more than the average of last year.

A recent survey showed Chinese online shoppers spent an average of 4,185 yuan at e-commerce sites in the past 12 months, according to media investment firm GroupM.

The survey covered 19,400 respondents in 279 domestic cities across different tiers.

It also reported a sharp rise of online expenditures among third and fourth tier cities’ residents as their average e-commerce spending grew 31.8 percent from a year ago to 3,768 yuan per capita. The average amount of expenditures for first and second tier cities’ residents was 4,378 yuan.

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