Singles' Day sales boom breaks records

A screen shows the sales volume of the e-commerce giant Alibaba exceeding 36 billion yuan (5.9 billion US dollars) of goods by 1:31 pm on Tuesday, Nov 11, 2014. [Photo: China News Service/Zhao Xiaoyan]

The online buying fiesta that is China's Singles' Day hit new records, with e-commerce giant Alibaba selling over 36 billion yuan (5.9 billion U.S. dollars) of goods by 1:31 p.m. on Tuesday.

Online sales -- on Alibaba's Tmall.com, Taobao.com and overseas outlets, such as AliExpress -- surpassed 36.2 billion yuan by 1:31 p.m., beating Tmall.com and Taobao.com's combined 2013 Singles's Day sales, according to the company.

This marks the first time Alibaba has chosen to launch its Singles' Day campaign on both its domestic and overseas outlets.

In the first hour of Tuesday's sale alone, customers from 175 countries and regions outside the Chinese mainland joined the shopping spree, with Hong Kong, the United States and Taiwan claiming the top-buyer spots.

The company said about 70 percent of shoppers used mobile devices to clinch deals at the start of the day, marking a major shift from computers to mobile devices as the favored tools for online purchases.

Starting as in-joke, Singles' Day was launched as a way for the unattached to celebrate -- or poke fun at -- their status. The timing of the holiday on Nov. 11 each year is based on the four solitary digits in 11.11. It has grown into the Chinese version of Cyber Monday,the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States, which is promoted as an online shopping day.

Alibaba launched its first sales campaign on Nov. 11, 2009.