Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba set a sales record on Singles Day, the world's largest 24-hours shopping event, with 38.3 billion dollars gross merchandise value (GMV).

GMV, a figure that shows sales across Alibaba's shopping platforms, surpassed last year's nearly $305 billion on Monday afternoon and kept rising through the day. At the end of the event, GMV stood at 38.3 billion dollars, just under a 26% rise from the figure posted last year. 

This is the 11th edition of China's Singles' Day - also known as Double 11. The shopping event is akin to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States and was first designed by Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall on Nov. 11 in 2009. 

Over the past decade, the online shopping event has developed from a domestic online sales promotion to a global shopping carnival.

The following facts and figures offer a glimpse into this year's shopping frenzy:

-- The latest figure shows a gross merchandise volume of 268,444,058,381 yuan (over 38.3 billion dollars) 

-- Sales of Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall hit 10 billion yuan (about 1.43 billion U.S. dollars) at just one minute and 36 seconds into Monday.

-- One hour, three minutes and 59 seconds after midnight, it surpassed 100 billion yuan.

-- At one hour, 26 minutes and seven seconds after midnight, sales on Tmall hit 120.7 billion yuan, exceeding the total sales on Singles' Day in 2016.

-- It only took 14 hours 21 minutes and 27 seconds to hit 200 billion yuan, eight hours less than last year.

-- At 16:31, sales of Tmall exceeded 213.5 billion yuan, surpassing last year's total sales.

-- Alibaba's "Double 11" orders peaked at 544,000 orders per second, setting a new record.

-- During the first Singles' Day shopping festival in 2009, only 27 brands participated. This year, more than 220,000 brands from over 200 countries and regions participated in this year's shopping spree.

-- More than 10 million items were available for purchase during the shopping festival on Tmall this year.

-- More than 100,000 online shops provided a live broadcast for consumer interaction.

-- TMall's livestreaming sector surpassed 10 billion yuan in just nine hours.

-- Nearly 1,000 foreign cyber celebrities broadcasted live on Tmall in different languages to boost global consumption.

-- JD.com, another Chinese online retail platform, reported cumulative sales of 165.8 billion yuan since Nov. 1 as of 9 a.m. Monday.

-- China's State Post Bureau said a total of 2.8 billion packages are expected to be handled from Nov. 11 to 18.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency