Automation enables Alibaba's record breaking Singles Day sales
Robotic devices were among the most popular items bought during this year's record-breaking Singles Day, which resulted in total sales for Alibaba of $25.3bn, compared to $17.8bn in 2016. The e-commerce event, which takes in all of China and more than 180 other countries, also relies heavily on automated systems to select and deliver 1.5 billion Alibaba parcels. Alibaba had specialist warehouses, 100,000 upgraded smart stores using vision, navigation and transport systems, and an army of human workers were on hand during the period, according to therobotreport.com.

The Singles’ Day Shopping Festival held each year on November 11th is just like Black Friday, Mothers’ Day or any other sales-oriented psuedo-holiday, but bigger and more extravagant. Starting in 2009 in China as a university campus event, Singles Day has now reached all over China and to more than 180 countries.

After 24 hours of non-stop online marketing, including a star-studded Gala with film star Nicole Kidman and American rapper Pharrell Williams, the day (also known as Bachelors Day or 11/11 because the number “1” is symbolic of an individual that is alone) concluded with a sales total of ¥168 billion ($25.3 billion) on the Tmall and Taobao e-commerce networks (both belong to the Alibaba Group (NASDAQ:BABA)). Other e-commerce platforms including Amazon’s Chinese site Amazon.cn, JD.com, VIP.com and Netease’s shopping site you.163.com also participated in the 11/11 holiday with additional sales.

Singles Day sales reported by Alibaba were $5.8 billion in 2013, $9.3 billion in 2014, $14.3 billion in 2015, $17.8 billion in 2016, and $25.3 billion for 2017.

In a story reported by DealStreetAsia, JD.com said that their sales for Singles’ Day – and its 10-day run-up – reached ¥127.1 billion ($19.1 billion), a 50% jump from a year ago. JD started its sales event on Nov. 1st to reduce delivery bottlenecks and to give users more time to make their purchasing decisions.

Muyuan Li, a researcher for The Robot Report, said: “Chinese people love shopping on e-commerce websites because sellers offer merchandise 20% – 60% cheaper than in the stores, particularly on 11/11. Sites and consumer items are marketed as a game and people love to play. For example, if you deposit or purchase coupons in advance, you can get a better deal. Customers compare prices on manmanbuy.com or smzdm.com and paste product page urls into xitie.com to see the historical prices for those products. There are lotteries to win Red Envelope “cash” which are really credits that can be applied to your Singles Day shopping carts, and contests to beat other shoppers to the check out.”

Robotics-related products sold in great quantities on Singles Day. ECOVACS and other brands of robot vacuum cleaners were big sellers as were DJI and other camera drones and all sorts of robotic toys and home assistants.

The process:

Although 11/11 was a great day for people buying robotic products, it was also a significant day for the new technologies of handling those products: 1.5 billion Alibaba parcels will transverse China over the next week delivering those purchases to Chinese consumers while all those packed and shipped items will have been manufactured, boxed, cased, temporarily stored and then unskidded, unboxed, picked and packed, sorted for shipment and shipped in all manner of ways.

New technology is part of how this phenomenal day is possible: robots, automation, vision systems, navigation systems, transportation systems and 100,000 upgraded smart stores (where people viewed items but then bought online) – all were part of the mechanical underside of this day – and foretell how this is going to play forward. There were also hundreds of thousands of human workers involved in the process.

Material handling:

Here are a few of the robotics-related Chinese warehousing systems vendors that are helping move the massive volume of 11/11’s 1.5 billion packages:

Alibaba and Jack Ma: