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Comment by lunaru | Hacker News Reader

Every year around this time we get the singles day news that yet another record has been broken. I'm going to guess it's going to be the same next year and the year after that since the Chinese middle class is growing (and adopting Western debt-driven spending). Not really a surprise.

If anyone in the US wants to partake in the frenzy, I believe aliexpress is doing a Singles Day thing (using US timezone, so it hasn't started yet as of this writing), but be careful with the shipping timelines on the products. I've had situations where items didn't arrive until weeks later and I had already forgotten that I'd bought anything.

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I really don't think the US is prepared for what happens when the entire world turns towards Chinese consumers and away from them.

At what percentage of the global economy do you think the US will become uninteresting?

(it's currently between ¼ and ⅕ of the global economy)

Once China reverses its mercantilist policy that % will plummet and the US will suffer very high levels of inflation.

That will probably happen once corruption in China becomes manageable, the Chinese stop moving their assets offshore and the US has no industrial technological advantage any more (i.e. once China can make equivalently good airplanes and microprocessors).

You mean the Chinese government will stop protecting their currency and hurt their export?

That isn't likely to happen soon even though other governments want them to float freely rather than in a price band.

China doesn't hold enough USD to hurt the US economy without hurting themselves even more seeing as the bonds are non-callable by the buyer.

>You mean the Chinese government will stop protecting their currency and hurt their export?

Right. Exactly like the US does right now.

>China doesn't hold enough USD to hurt the US economy

It isn't about who holds the little green bits of paper. It's about who can turn off the wealth spigot.

The US would experience a huge bout of inflation right now if China decided to just float, it's just that China would probably suffer too. Once the US has nothing China wants (soon) they will have no reason to keep giving us a bargain on their imports.

I've been reading this argument since at least 2003.

And? In 2003 they weren't even close to technological and industrial parity but even then it was fairly evident that they would be within < 25 years.

Now they're not far off parity - maybe 5-7 years before they can manufacture anything the US can.

Trends that continue for a long time do not continue forever. That goes double for things that look like a free lunch.

Exactly. People seem to forget that the fastest (publicly known) supercomputer in the world is made of components that are 100% chinese made (including the CPUs). They are catching up fast, and yet folks continue to bury their heads in the sand.

>You mean the Chinese government will stop protecting their currency and hurt their export?

For the last two years, their problem was the opposite. They went quite draconian on people selling RMB to keep currency strong.

The main motivation is to allow CCP keep throwing money around the globe, buying allies

Why would this happen? Are French markets ignored because the US exists? Nobody wants to leave billions on the table...

When you're designing an iPhone, the French market is an afterthought. The US and Chinese markets are not. In a decade or two, the Chinese and Indian markets could get so huge that the US market becomes an afterthought. Although unlikely, it's a definite possibility.

This is interesting because the US was the record holder less than five years ago. Five years later, China's Single's Day is several times that of the US's Black Friday. Very soon, it will be an order of magnitude bigger than the Black Friday of the US.

More reasonable reason, the online shopping experience in China is much much better than in US. In China, if you are living some metropolis, the logistic is really faster than in US without any prime membership (normally within two days). And also the price is much cheaper compared with physical retail store. So, most people would prefer online shopping if possible.

I live in Thailand and buying from US online merchants is usually a nonstarter because of shipping costs which are often much more than the price of the item itself. When I buy something from Aliexpress it is usually free shipping, or something reasonable for heavier items. There is no Amazon here but there are a couple local versions, Lazada being one. They usually have shorter delivery times but cost more than Aliexpress, though not always. US online merchants aren't even in the ballpark.

How long does it take for packages to get to you? In Australia I had a run of less than two weeks but it's been back up to a month recently.

It varies a lot. Sometimes 2 weeks, more often 3 to 4. Currently a number of items seem overdue at more than 5 weeks.

I ordered from Amazon while I was in Thailand and it actually worked pretty well. The shipping wasn't cheap, but it wasn't prohibitive. The most expensive part was the import duties charged by Thai customs. It still ended up being cheaper than if I'd bought the items locally. Though I was on an island in the south, so that might not have been the case in Bangkok.

Still...it's definitely not a non-starter. And with the exception of shipping updates which were non-existent once Thai post got their hands on the package, everything worked surprisingly well. All told, it took 7 days to arrive, shipping was ~$50 and customs was ~$65 on a ~$300 order that would have cost over $500 locally where the selection would've meant getting something that wasn't exactly what I wanted.

That's not too bad.

Not Amazon, but a recent experience I had. I wanted to order a kit from Vex Robotics. Cost of the kit was $80. Shipping from the US was $150. Supposedly it's available from a Vex reseller in Thailand so I contacted them and they quoted $190 for the $80 kit with a one month delivery time. So they are just ordering it from the US and having it shipped at a somewhat lower cost. I am not desperate for the kit so its a nonstarter for me. I can almost certainly find a serviceable substitute from a Chinese supplier who will ship to Thailand at a fraction of the cost.

Online shopping works pretty well in the USA. My wife (Chinese) doesn’t see too much difference since we moved to the USA from Beijing last year. We no longer buy things like bottled water (well, we don’t need to!) or other groceries/soft goods online like we did in BJ, but we have semi daily packages of everything else.

China has great same day logistics using poorly paid guys on electric bikes (so food and soft good delivery is very reasonable), but everything else is equivalent or a bit worse than the states.

Are you joking? I lived in Seattle and so desperate about my Amazon experience. For your logistics statement, isn't that one of China's advantage? And also, for those delivery workers, most of them are from small villages or suburb, so they are happy doing logistic in the metropolis as they can make far more than as being the farmers.

My point was that it couldn’t last. And damn it, I don’t miss the backup sounds of the electric trikes beneath my apartment (we lived 13 floors above a small depot in taiyahggong).

Sorry your amazon experience has been so horrible. We live in Bellevue and it has worked out well for us. Sometimes we have to use the amazon delivery lockers at the 7-11 across the street, though.

It's still a hugely significant number. $18B is $13.20USD for every man, woman and child in China. Considering China's GDP is $8000USD, that's basically 60% of a single day's earnings for every person in China being spent at just one company in 12 hours.

It would be the same as everyone in the US spending $100 on the same day or $32B in a single day (which is almost half of US online spending for a year).

US consumers spend over $32 billion every day of the year. The average American adult spends $57,000 per year as of 2016. The consumer economy in the US is around $13 trillion.

http://www.businessinsider.com/13-trillion-us-consumer-getti...

China's GDP is $11.x trillion for 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

That's a bit of a misleading stat since most consumer spending is on stuff like housing/transportation/food/utilities.

That's not misleading at all. That's how consumer spending is measured. How would you go about explaining that water, electricity and food are not consumption goods, but an iPad is?

It's misleading here because it has nothing really to do with Alibaba or Amazon; of course there are differences in cost of living in the USA and China, the interesting figure here is online spending, or luxury spending, etc.

It's misleading because nobody is buying water or electricity or paying rent on Alibaba today for 11.11.

Comparing apples to apples would mean comparing the amount spent online in the U.S. with a single company. Even comparing apples to pears would mean comparing all online sales in the U.S. to Alibaba 11.11 sales.

Comparing all "consumer spending" in the U.S. with Alibaba 11.11 sales is, well, it's misleading.

Your numbers on US online spending are way off. US online spending was about $400B in 2016. In 2017 Amazon alone has posted about 120B in revenue (low 100s minus AWS) year to date with guidance for 55-60B in Q4 alone.

AliExpress is huge in Russia and CIS countries and that contributes a lot to the sales volume.

> I've had situations where items didn't arrive until weeks later and I had already forgotten that I'd bought anything.

This might be a good litmus test for whether you actually need what you're buying :-)

> I've had situations where items didn't arrive until weeks later and I had already forgotten that I'd bought anything.

I love that! It's like getting a present from myself.

(Depending on how important the item was, of course...)

I do this with Chinese electronic modules. I order a bunch of interesting things and get mailbombed about a month later. $10 spent is hours of fun! Granted most of it is crap but it’s fun finding that out and tutting and shaking my head in disgust.

If you're in the U.S. just wait a few more years because this is what Amazon models their Prime day after.

That is typical for the order times, it takes weeks. Now that it is the singles day, it would take even longer.

An easy solution is to look for the ones with ePacket shipping. It is tracked and you'd normally expect it in two weeks. Some give it for free, some charge about a dollar for it.

Singles day is way too close to Black Friday, I don’t see room for both shopping frenzies in November. Besides, most cultures aren’t into numerology as much as Chinese are (they don’t think 11/11 is that interesting), so the gimmick doesn’t really translate well outside of china.

I added a few dollars to the frenzy. Been adding items to my Aliexpress shopping cart for the last week. Mostly small electronics hobbyist items and Arduino compatible boards and sensor modules. Pulled the trigger after the 11.11 sale opened up.

Just out of interest, can you check a couple of prices on Dealextreme, Gearbest and Banggood to see if they're comparable?

Among the items I ordered today:

HC-06: Dealextreme $5.50, Banggood $5.99, Gearbest $6.57, Aliexpress $2.58

Arduino Nano v3.0: Dealextreme $3.46, Banggood $2.77, Gearbest $4.27, Aliexpress $1.66

Wow! I haven't seen that kind of differential for a while. I wonder if it's just because of 11.11

I made a mental note of some of the prices before the 11.11 discount kicked in. The discounts were around 10%, sometimes less. So the Aliexpress regular prices were already way lower.

The thing is, on Aliexpress there are many, many sellers of each of those items and there is often a significant price difference among them. If that is due to quality or delivery times I have not figured it out yet. So I usually buy from the cheapest who has a fair number of sales and few if any complaints in the reviews.

Man, can you share some more of your shopping list for those of us with similar interests?

Other items from my 11.11 shopping list:

KY-008 laser transmitter module $0.32

5V stepper motor with driver board $1.82

LCD1602 I2C board $1.68

4X3 membrane switch keypad $0.52

STM32F103C8T6 dev board $1.58

K975 Micro 130 Vibration Motor (2 pcs) $1.48

Tilt sensor module $0.37

KY-013 temp sensor module $0.29

GY-521 gyro/accel module $0.99

WS2812 RGB LED 12 bit ring $1.40

RF receiver & transmitter module pair $0.82

IR obstacle avoidance sensor module $0.69

HC-SR502 PIR motion sensor module $0.72

Thanks!

HC-06 is US$3.46 on Ebay. Arduino Nano v3 is US$3.29

Ebay has a pretty good return/refund policy. And then you can fall-back on Paypal too.

> Ebay has a pretty good return/refund policy. And then you can fall-back on Paypal too.

Anecdotal evidence, but I have had far more success with AliExpress' dispute/buyer protection system than eBay's.

eBay is laughably bad at disputes. I have received several items from eBay which were DOA, and my options were to take a very reduced refund, or ship the item back to the seller at my expense.

Same issue with AliExpress, upload evidence (pictures/video) of the DOA item, full refund no further questions.

PayPal is another nightmare in of itself.

Are the sales numbers inflation adjusted?

And your prediction will certainly be true because Chinese are usually not very honest and like to brag that they have just set another new record (I'm married to a Chinese and she says the same).

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