World Shopping Day Date in the current year: November 11, 2024

November 11 is observed in China as Singles’ Day. Such a date was chosen because the number “1” in 11/11 resembles an individual who is alone. As the observance grew in popularity, Alibaba Group, one of China’s leading e-commerce conglomerates, found a way to monetize it.

In 2009, Alibaba’s sites (Taobao, Tmall, and others) offered discounts up to 50% on the occasion of Singles’ Day. The experiment turned out to be successful, and since then, Singles’ Day has become the largest online shopping day in the world, outgrowing America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That’s why it is sometimes referred to as World Shopping Day.

In 2017, Alibaba’s retail sites set a world record for most payment transactions during November 11. Its mobile and online payment platform Alipay processed 256,000 payment transactions per second and a total of 1.48 billion transactions. That day, shoppers spent over 168.2 billion yuan ($25.4 billion).