Alibaba Posts $1B in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.
Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.
What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals.
The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it.
On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
For example: ebay.com,ebay.com.hk amazon.com,amazon.com.hk tmall.com,tmall.hk
You are not allowed to open a tmall.hk shop unless you are a globally recognized brand or a shop that makes at least xx million € of revenue a year, its more or less invite only. Its a premium platform.
The reason Alibaba did this is that chinese people don't trust their own brands and shops, so for certain goods where safety is important and luxury goods they flock to foreign brands.
Chinese people usually think HK stuff was more wester like, so a .hk tld stands for foreign goods.
I visited Alibaba HQ last month. People seemed pretty worked and driven by deadlines which can decrease their code quality. The teams I talked to didn't do much testing.
Off topic, but in contrast to americans, german people are often frowning and complaining a lot - even though we really don't have much cause, in comparison. Friendliness and positivity are some of the things I really appreciate about the USA. Treasure it!
For sure, Alibaba is working all hands on deck and burning the midnight oil right now.
And yeah, I hope the nation can continue being positive and empathetic, and even grow more friendly in that regard.
There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software.
Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail.
[1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase
[2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5
[3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf
Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)
I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form.
There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase
https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]).
I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale.
[1] https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected again! :)
I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival).
On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
Temperature Controlled Outlet 33.3 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.t80P3i&id=536295296729&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3200881016743
Water Heater 19.9 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.MjQ88E&id=527717128601&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&skuId=3219050495205
Aquarium Wave Maker 15.9 RMB https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.47.Wgm0TD&id=533814521124&ns=1&abbucket=4#detail
50 L Plastic Box 35.0 RMB https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.13.haJnJy&id=530500415822&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=4&sku_properties=21433:648878820
Canada.
> How long are the shipping times for you?
Very long, but I'm not in a hurry. Between 2 weeks and 2 months.
If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
Of course this is taking op very literally
EDIT: I checked: google "0.001% * 1 year" and it tells you 5.259 minutes, so you were off due to dropping the % sign. That changes things dramatically: beyond the 100x difference, there is very high likelihood that someone would check back 2 minutes later (especially if they are waiting all year), so 5 minutes of downtime (spread over a whole day) likely objectively results in much lower lost sales than your calculation implied! For future envelope calculations don't forget that a % sign is exactly moving the decimal two more places! 55.2% is exactly .552 and so forth!
What I do is, have an active-active system in a data center, and with another similar system in another DC.
Having said that, your average online stock brokers do the same thing.
It says something interesting about how think about "high reliability." What it really means is "must never, ever fail" which kind of makes "% reliability" a sort of strange euphemism, I think.
I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands)
Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)
It's not just Aliexpress...
They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.
So either you are making this up or you definition of "highest" isn't quite on the mark.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/20/world/fg-madeinitaly...
http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2014/12/11032-gucci-and-...
http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/12/22/gucci-prad... (couldn't find an english version of this one, sorry)
"Sold to Gucci for €24 euros each (around $28.09) despite a retail rate of $1000, Aroldo Guidotti of the subcontractor, leather goods specialist Mondo Libero, was filmed discussing the cost saving strategy of replacing Italian workers with Chinese nationals, who are hired as part-time employees, and yet work more hours than those on a full-time contract."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_origin
The inverse manipulation is used by Pakistani manufacturers of surgical instruments. They buy stamped steel blanks from Germany, perform the labour-intensive grinding and sharpening in Pakistan, then label the instruments as "Made in Germany" by claiming that they did not undergo substantial transformation in Pakistan.
Believe me or no. Italian effective tax rate for a factory business is less than that in China.
Most Italian shoe and fashion goods factories in Italy are owned by Chinese these days.
So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Besides, the iPhone is < 10% Chinese (final assembly), a lot of the components are coming from ROK, Japan, Taiwan, and of course the IP is all American.
For clothes, the amount that foreign companies is paying on material and labor was already ridiculously low, and they still pay for their other costs in dollars (or rather, not yuan) so....
Most of operations were ran like that: company imports loose goods from China at few pennies, and puts in "value" into them, most of the times just packaging with writing in English that was supposed to "cost" few dollars each, but of course the packaging was made in China for less than a penny each. This also allowed the Sg intermediary to claim expense on the stuff, reducing effective tax to single digits.
Those were golden times.
One of my wife's friends is a Chinese citizen who lives in Italy. She selects purses, backpacks, and occasionally wine and markets them in China. There is a lot of demand for showing up your friends with expensive imported goods. Even more benefit if you had to use a connection to purchase the goods.
The DDOS extortion guys are getting really good at their job. They even broke Akamai a few weeks ago. It's a spiral where they extort money and use it to improve their infrastructure to be able to extort bigger and bigger players. I have zero doubt that Alibabba's servers were already straining under the load of that many shoppers. Adding a DDOS on top of that would be catastrophic.
I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying.
Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.
Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent zero on ads.
Instead we should have a "buy nothing day" that'd get celebrated for its 0$ sales.
I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!
2 Aliexpress.com tries to make tons of UDP connections, WebRTC? (unable to disable in desktop chrome)
I've used Alibaba.com as well, but the payment methods are far different and it's a more risky situation with fewer guarantees. That service I use for high-value orders after a thorough vetting of the seller. Mostly commodity items like a pallet of green coffee beans, or weird chemicals in unusual quantities.
Sometimes an order on Aliexpress will be large enough that I must consider negotiating with someone on Alibaba.com instead. Negotiations happen for me on Aliexpress as well, but the sellers on Alibaba.com seem to have greater latitude in not only price, but also packing, shipping, and handling to destination.