China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival has already passed one trillion yuan in sales — and today, Sunday, November 8, AliExpress starts its warm-up sale for shoppers outside China, three days before the festival peaks.
Singles’ Day falls on Wednesday, November 11, but sales started weeks early: JD.com opened on October 12, and Tmall and Taobao began pre-sales on October 15, with the main sale starting October 20. Third-party tracker Syntun estimates 1,026.3 billion yuan — about $144 billion — was spent between October 7 and 31 across the major platforms, up 2.4% on last year. Tmall leads, followed by JD.com and Douyin.
No platform has published its own total — Alibaba last did so in 2021 — and forecasts for the full festival conflict. Syntun expects total sales of 1.7 trillion yuan, up 14.2%, while Citi puts industry growth at low-to-mid single digits. Neither should be presented as a settled total, and Syntun notes its figures are its own estimates from public pages, not platform-audited.
AliExpress warm-up starts today
For shoppers outside China, the festival runs on a different clock. AliExpress’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival runs from November 1 to 18 for US shoppers, with a warm-up from November 8 to 10 and the main sale from November 11 to 19. Beauty took 8.0% of the October 7–31 total, according to Syntun, and Alibaba says a record one million brands and more than 70 million products are taking part this year, with 60,000 first-time merchants.
The festival’s peak comes on the night of November 10, from 8 p.m. China time, through to midnight on November 11. Tmall’s festival runs to November 13, and JD.com’s to November 11, with a returns phase from November 12 to 13.
A festival still growing — slowly
Last year’s total was an estimated 1.695 trillion yuan, according to Syntun, and this year’s early growth of 2.4% suggests a mature market finding new products to keep shoppers spending. This year’s surprise category is artificial intelligence: it is the first Singles’ Day where AI token and subscription packs are a major category, with influencer Li Jiaqi selling about 100,000 monthly memberships of Alibaba’s QwenWork AI service in about 30 minutes on November 2, according to Reuters — a story covered in yesterday’s post.
For Western retailers watching from the sidelines, the lesson is that the world’s biggest shopping day is no longer just about discounts. It is about whatever is new — and this year, that is AI subscriptions, sold next to phones and laptops with the same coupons, countdowns and livestream hype. The full festival total will not be known until after the final day, and no platform has published its own figure since 2021.
