Photo/Shetuwang

Nov.26 (NBD) -- Black Friday kicked off the U.S. holiday shopping season with consumers flooded into stores and logged onto e-commerce sites in search of deals.

Black Friday pulled in 6.22 billion U.S. dollars in online sales, up 23.6 percent from a year ago and setting a new high, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks transactions for 80 of the top 100 internet retailers in the U.S.

In just the first nine hours of Black Friday, Amazon customers have ordered more than 1 million toys and more than 700,000 fashion items. As America's largest e-commerce platform, Amazon said the promotion activities will continue through Cyber Monday, the Monday immediately follows Black Friday and also one of the biggest online shopping days of the year in the U.S.

The country's online sales made from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is expected to be around only one third of what Alibaba made in China's Double 11 shopping festival alone this year.

The gross merchandise volume (GMV) of Alibaba's e-commerce arm Tmall reached 213.5 billion yuan (30.7 billion U.S. dollars) and the number of its delivery orders totaled 1.042 billion on the day, creating new world records. 

This year marks the 10th anniversary since Alibaba has initiated its Double 11 shopping festival. During that period, it has accumulated amazing expertise in online trading, new retail, payment and logistics, which helped the e-commerce company stand out.

Hu Xi, deputy CTO of Ant Financial, took online payment as an example in an interview with the new media outlet of Securities Times. He said the system of Alibaba's online shopping platform was even close to a breakdown during the hush hour of the Double 11 shopping festival in 2010. But with the development of technologies, the tech behemoth's system is able to handle up to 1.7 billion deals per second in real time.

In the meantime, 60.3 percent of the company's buyers made payments with biotechnologies such as fingerprints and facial recognition, which helped reduce payment time to 1 second, said Hu.

Alipay, Alibaba's payment arm, will make its self-developed core technologies, such as distributed database OceanBas, distributed architecture OFAStack and AI-powered risk engine AlphaRisk, fully open to small- and medium-sized financial institutions and enterprises.

With the help of logistics expertise, e-commerce will be available in a wider area with third-and fourth-tier cities to be better connected than before, which in turn unleashes greater market potential.

Email: tanyuhan@nbd.com.cn