BEIJING – More than 300 million Chinese consumers lapped up goods worth $26 billion from online shopping platforms during a shopping festival that dwarfed Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the celebrated shopping dates in the western world. Sales on Singles Day, as it is called, broke a series of records mocking the humdrum mood of government officials worrying about economic slowdown.

Singles Day shopping, which started as an anti-Valentine festival to celebrate singleness, was made attractive by 39,487 brands offering attractive discounts over 16 major online shopping platforms run by companies like Alibaba, jd.com and Sunning, according to data provider, Syntun.

Discounts ranged between 30 to 80 per cent on a wide range of goods including clothes, shoes, electronic and household goods. Almost everything sold in brick and mortar shops including restaurant coupons were on sale with massive discounts.

Discounts were also available for major international brands raising questions among consumers about how retailers could afford it. Over 47 million customers bought products sold by international brands, according to market estimates. Reports suggest that Chinese living in different parts of the world, particularly in South East Asia, participated in the shopping festival.

Contrast this with the sales of $3 billion that Americans spend during the Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day in the United States, last year, according to research firm comScore.

The government put high-speed trains, which are meant for passengers, on the task of carrying boxes and packets to clear up the logistics choking taking place across the country. Jd.com, the second biggest platform after Alibaba, said it used drones to deliver goods to remote rural areas for the first time. Alibaba, which introduced the shopping festival, led by way capturing 68.2 per cent of the sales.

The Chinese festival, known as 11/11 day because it falls on November 11 every year, involved a wide network of manufacturers, marketing companies, thousands of retail shop owners on online platforms and logistics companies working in a coordinated fashion like a massive war engine. The logistics network employed 1.7 million delivery personnel who go about their tasks in trucks and millions of delivery vans armed with address lists and mobile phones.

Sales this year nearly doubled that of last year, and far exceeded the expectations of market pundits. Consumers booked 1.07 billion orders on a single day. This is a lot more than last year’s sales, which resulted in 650 million delivery packets.

An important take-way for many involved in the communications and marketing field is that 82 per cent of the orders were booked on mobile phones, and very small numbers on computers and laptops. Incidentally, mobile phones are one of the “hot” items on sale because Chinese are fast developing a penchant for changing and upgrading their phones in less than one year.

This is also a day when young people treat each other to dinner or give gifts to each other.

The shopping festival, 11.11 for November 11, signifying four singles was introduced in 2009 by Alibaba, which cashed on the fact that China is full of men and women, products of one child policy, who prefer to remain single. Soon, other online shopping companies like Sunning got into the act.

The government, keen to encourage consumer spending, has gone out of the way to facilitate the festival. It is a sign of the growth of ecommerce in China, which rose 26.1 percent in the first nine months of this year.