How to keep the world's largest online shopping festival running smoothly

• Processing power is equivalent to processing 230 high-resolution photos of each of the world’s 7 billion people

• Some 7.7 trillion lines of real-time data handled

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has unveiled some of the 'magic’ supporting of the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.

This year’s 11.11, which generated US$74.1 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) over an 11-day period, was made possible by Alibaba Cloud infrastructure upgrades. Right after midnight on November 11, for example, just 26 seconds after shopping began, peak orders hit 583,000 per second – 1,400 times the peak volume at the festival’s debut 12 years ago on November 11 2009, Alibaba Cloud said.

“We were very proud to support 800 million consumers and 250,000 brands during the world’s largest shopping festival,” said Li Cheng, CTO, Alibaba Group.

“From the robust digital infrastructure supporting zero downtime operation, to cloud-native offerings for developers’ efficiencies and consumer-facing applications for creating some of smoothest engagement experiences, Alibaba’s technologies have once again passed the toughest tests with flying colours.”

“Alibaba Cloud has been at the forefront of cloud database product offerings for many years,” said Dr Li Feifei, President of Database Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“In the cloud-native era, it is even more pivotal for businesses to be able to take advantage of innovative database as a service (DBaaS) offerings to enhance and support high-concurrency and high-volume web applications such as e-commerce, online gaming and financial technology. Many Fortune 500 firms are already using our Cloud DBaaS for mobile apps, backups and tests, and the most recent impressive performance of our proprietary solutions during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival is yet another strong endorsement on our capability.”

Alibaba’s real-time computing platform, powered by Apache Flink, processed data streams totalling 4 billion items per second during peak time, a considerable leap from 2.5 billion last year. MaxCompute, Alibaba’s proprietary data warehousing platform, handled 1.7 exabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes) of data on average per day during the 11-day festival from November 1 to 11, equivalent to processing 230 high-resolution photos of each of the 7 billion people in the world. Despite the extreme scalability and high performance required, no downtime was reported throughout this year’s extended festival period.

Leveraging cloud-native databases, including PolarDB, AnalyticDB and Lindorm, Alibaba Cloud enabled 11.11 to run smoothly even during peak periods. PolarDB set a new record with 140 million queries per second during peak time at 11.11, a 60% increase from last year. AnalyticDB, Alibaba Cloud’s self-developed cloud native data warehouse, processed up to 7.7 trillion lines of real-time data, equalling 15 times the data contained in the UK Web Archive at the British Library*. In addition, PolarDB-X and AnalyticDB helped China Post to deal with more than 100 million orders during 11.11, with about 100,000 China Post users checking their parcels’ real-time status online.

Highlights from this year’s technologies and innovations include:

More engaging consumer experiences

● Livestreaming took centrestage at this year’s 11.11. Tens of thousands of livestreams were broadcast on Taobao Live. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s narrow-bandwidth and high-definition video solutions, such as its Real-time Streaming (RTS) technology to reduce latency to less than one second (approximately 75% lower than the industry average), the smooth livestreaming experience and the dynamic interactions enabled were effective in boosting sales. For Bissell, a US-based floor-cleaning products specialist, 16 hours of livestreaming its vacuums and other products during 11.11 was critical to more-than-quadrupling its sales from a year earlier, said MD for Asia Max Bissell.

● By leveraging Alibaba DAMO Academy’s latest multimodule technology - including natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) and cloud rendering - Taobao Live launched its virtual anchor service for merchants. Virtual anchors can explain product details, respond to some enquiries and even play games with the audience during livestreaming sessions, while the human anchors are on break resting (usually from midnight to early morning).

● AliExpress, Alibaba’s global retail marketplace, unveiled the world’s first real-time livestreaming translation feature on an e-commerce platform powered by DAMO Academy’s speech technology, supporting simultaneous translation from Chinese to English, Russian, Spanish and French. During 11.11, over 70% of AliExpress merchants leveraged this translation capability, which can also reduce inaudibility in noisy livestreaming environments and even understand accented speech. Eight million global viewers watched over 9,000 livestreams on AliEpxress during the festival.

● Virtual tours with 3D visuals was available on Taobao to sell big-ticket items like houses and furniture. Underpinned by machine learning technologies like graph neural networks (GNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), 3D shape analysis and knowledge graphs, Alibaba offered a 3D modelling design platform for brands, reducing the time for model creation from three hours to 10 seconds. Merchants leveraged the technology to create over 100,000 showrooms with virtual 3D products that were experienced by 60 million consumers during the festival.

The contribution from cloud-native technologies

● Last year’s festival saw Alibaba Group migrate 100% of its core systems onto Alibaba Cloud, the world’s third-largest cloud service provider. The global technology leader continued to push and challenge the technological limits with its cloud-native innovation, which has yielded double the efficiency of scalable application delivery.

● Alibaba Cloud supported one of the world’s largest container clusters, enabling the upscaling to 1 million containers in an hour. The optimal elasticity and scheduling capacity enabled by the cutting-edge cloud-native technologies led to an 80% reduction of computing resources for every 10,000 transactions conducted compared to four years ago.

A greener 11.11

● Alibaba used state-of-the-art green technologies - including liquid cooling and wind energy – at its five hyperscale data centres to ensure the most environmentally-friendly operation during 11.11. For instance, the hyperscale data centre in Hangzhou has one of the world’s largest server clusters submerged in a specialised liquid which quickly chills the IT hardware. This reduces energy consumption by over 70%, while its power usage effectiveness (PUE) approaches the ideal target of 1.0. Compared to traditional data centres, the Hangzhou hyperscale data centre can save up to 70 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

● Nearly 100% of the packaging shipped from Cainiao warehouses was biodegradable, and nearly 50% of the paper packaging in its warehouses was tape-free. Consumers were encouraged to recycle their own packaging, with Cainiao setting up around 80,000 recycling stations in China. Users were incentivised with “green energy” points on Cainiao’s mini-program, Cainiao Ocean.

● Alibaba’s online grocery service, Tmall Supermarket, used 4 million reusable boxes for orders made on its platforms during 11.11.

● Brands also partnered with Alibaba to roll out green initiatives. For instance, all of L’Oréal’s products sold on Tmall this 11.11 are being shipped to consumer in environmentally-friendly packaging.

Smarter logistics

After handling 1.88 billion 11.11-related delivery orders last year, Alibaba’s Cainiao logistics unit this year processed 2.32 billion orders.

● During this year’s 11.11 pre-sales period, Cainiao’s smart logistics platform leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to assign and ship packages to selected consumers, said Sun Jian, who headed up this year’s 11.11 logistics efforts. That meant that packages could be more-quickly dispatched to buyers once 11.11 officially started. Cainiao further capitalised on the dual shopping window model this 11.11 to improve the delivery experience. In between windows, Cainiao ramped up efforts to assist merchants in different international locations to assemble their stock for Chinese consumers.

● Cainiao operated over 700 chartered flights to fulfil cross-border product deliveries. To speed up delivery of overseas goods to China, Cainiao worked with international merchants to move their products into seven Cainiao e-hubs. Cainiao also rolled out new self-service technology at its post stations to enable fast parcel collection by consumers.

● Cainiao was also in the livestreaming game this year, introducing cameras at different shipping and collection points so consumers could check up on the status of their packages. Over 100 million consumers tuned into Cainiao’s livestreams.

Alizila shared that Lazada, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, also reported a record-breaking 11.11. The platform said COVID-related disruptions brought more local merchants in the region online in recent months. Highlights from Lazada's 11.11 include:

Engagement

● The one-day event attracted more than 40 million users and 400,000 brands and sellers.

● LazLive, the platform’s livestreaming channel, attracted over 11 million views on November 11.

● User engagement increased by 3.5%, with two games added to the platform, and shoppers logged over 70 million minutes on Lazada’s in-app games.

Sales

● It took 100 seconds for Lazada to reach US$11 million in sales and a half-day for LazMall, its virtual shopping mall, to surpass last year’s GMV.

● Twenty-six brands joined the LazMall Millionaires Club. Members must have over US$1 million in sales. Samsung Electronics was one of the first brands to hit US$10 million in sales.

● More than 8,000 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) topped US$10,000 in sales, twice as many as last year. Their overall online success represents a bigger trend of digital adoption among local businesses, accelerated by COVID-19, Alibaba said.

This year, the event featured two shopping windows, the first from November 1-3, and the second for 24 hours on November 11, to offer more opportunities for sales. Last year’s 11.11 GMV was US$38.4 billion. Some 31,766 overseas brands offered goods on Alibaba’s cross-border platforms this 11.11.

According to Alvin Liu, Tmall Import and Export GM, an increasing number of new brands joined Tmall Global – Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce platform – ahead of 11.11, as they saw “huge domestic demand in the Chinese market as a source of hope”. This year, over 26,000 brands from 84 countries and regions took part in 11.11, offering 1.2 million new products from overseas to Chinese consumers.

“We look forward to helping even more international brands accelerate their entry and growth in China,” Liu said. “Without having to leave China, consumers can access a rich selection of products from around the globe, just using their smartphones.”

11.11 goes beyond transactions. The Alibaba Business Operating System (ABOS) was launched in January to empower brands and retailers to accelerate or refine their digital transformation and raise their competitiveness in China. With ABOS, Alibaba helps partners harness all the services they need from Alibaba’s digital ecosystem, including retail, payment, digital marketing, logistics, cloud computing, and on-demand local services. International brands at 11.11 which are also leveraging the ABOS included McDonald’s, Starbucks, Unilever and L’Oréal.

“Shoppers wait for this moment and want to be surprised, excited by brands. Brands need to reinvent themselves every year, and probably in China, nearly every month,” said L’Oréal China CEO and President Fabrice Megarbane. “So, I feel this festival is the perfect opportunity to question ourselves: Are we relevant enough and are we explaining enough about our innovation?”

11.11 recorded a lot of firsts for the luxury category. Initially skeptical about joining Alibaba's online luxury platform as they were concerned about diluting brand equity, luxury brands now see that they can maintain their own cachét while reaching an entirely new clientele. Luxury brands also appreciate the data insights from the platform and no longer worry that online will take away from their offline retail business.

Nearly 200 luxury and designer brands from the Tmall Luxury Pavilion participated in this year’s 11.11, double the number of brands from last year. Prada, Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Balenciaga, Kenzo and Chloe were first-timers. According to Alibaba, over 90% of the participating brands’ GMV had surpassed their 11.11 full-day sales records from last year, including Net-a-Porter, Bottega Veneta, Qeelin, Coach, Michael Kors — all of which had passed the milestone within the first hour of the event. The jewellery category saw the fastest growth, exceeding the category’s total sales from last year in just half an hour, both on the pavilion and via other Alibaba platforms.

Additionally, about seven in 10 of the customers buying from the Tmall Luxury Pavilion this 11.11 were also first-timers. These customers represent nearly 70% of the total luxury-goods sales generated on the Pavilion during 11.11.

“We love how the platform helps us expand consumer touchpoints without having to expand physically, and we can easily analyse their shopping behaviours, such as what they are buying and what time of day they tend to shop,” said Longchamp GM, China Josephine Liang.

“The more we work together with Luxury Pavilion, the more we realise that online and offline channels are not cannibalising each other.”

Speaking at a conference in Shanghai on November 16, Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang shared that COVID-19 underpinned new consumer behaviours and trends this year. The number of older consumers - Baby Boomers and Gen Xers - spiked 300% from the previous year, a trend that continued from earlier this year when they were forced online by China’s COVID lockdowns. But while they went online out of necessity, they’ve stayed online even when they no longer have to, he shared. 

Zhang also highlighted that 357 emerging brands became top sellers in their respective categories this year, which he attributed to their rapid digital adaptation and direct-to-consumer outreach.

Explore:

Watch the video on real-time translation for livestreaming

*There are over 500 terabytes of data in the British Library’s UK Web Archive.