After Midnight on Double 11

Buyers, sellers, programmers, bank IT staff, couriers, marketers, analysts … Alibaba, Xiaomi, JD.com … How did they spend the night?

The instant her computer clock turned to 00:00, “Zhuliye,” who had been chatting with a colleague on QQ about a new TV drama starting production, switched to her Taobao cart and paid for two coats from the Korean brand O’ND. The clock read 00:01. She could hardly believe it. “That seemed almost too easy. Was what I wanted just too niche?”

She loved the brand. She worked in television in an office building at Hong Kong Plaza in Shanghai, often shopped on overseas websites and traveled abroad three or four times a year. “Zhuliye” was her Taobao username. “O’ND rarely has sales. It hardly even discounts in Korea.” One coat she wanted was originally priced at nearly 9,000 yuan but cost 2,245 yuan for Double 11. The other had been more than 5,000 yuan and was now 1,000 yuan. With another 200 yuan off an order over 1,799 yuan, she paid just 3,045 yuan. She had braced herself to fight for the purchase, but it felt as if it was over before it began.

Many others were less lucky. The surge of traffic when sales opened left plenty of people stuck on the payment page. In the first minute of this year’s Double 11, Tmall recorded 54.51 million yuan in sales—just 46.59% of the amount in the same period last year.

He Jiling, who lived in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang district, had a much fuller cart. “Basically, everything the whole family wants to buy is in my cart.” She had lined up more than a dozen items: a Joyoung juicer, an Electrolux coffee maker and an imported German Ofeis slicing knife for her parents; an ultrasonic eyeglass cleaner and a Braun electric toothbrush for her boyfriend’s father; and, for herself, Lion toothpaste, a Beats speaker that came with headphones, beef jerky, underwear from a particular brand and a L’Oréal brightening beauty box containing six products from Lancôme, Kiehl’s and Shu Uemura.

She, too, charged in at midnight and had finished her “battle” within five minutes, apart from the underwear. Just as she was about to pay, its buy button turned gray. A message told her that someone had yet to pay and she might still have a chance. He Jiling promptly replaced it with a facial cleanser that had already become a bestseller.

Meanwhile, inside the Double 11 broadcast room at Alibaba’s Xixi campus in Hangzhou, a giant screen—16 meters long, 6 meters high, nearly 100 square meters in area and more than 7 tons in weight—showed that Tmall’s total transaction value had reached 2 billion yuan, eight minutes faster than the year before.

(Alibaba’s Xixi campus on the night of November 10, 2014)

At Alibaba’s headquarters, known as “Taobao City,” the lights were on in 95% of offices that night. It was as brightly lit as the year before, but this year was different for Alibaba: everyone was waiting to see what kind of Double 11 results it would deliver after its stock-market listing. More than 11,000 Alibaba Group employees took part in what the company regarded as an especially significant Double 11.

The hours after midnight were the busiest for people in key technical and operations roles. Hu Haoyuan was writing code and watching data reports when he glanced over and saw someone familiar. It took him a moment to realize it was Jet Li, visiting to observe. “For a second, I thought I should go over and spar with him, do some push hands or something. But work was too hectic, so I just took a photo and posted it to Moments.”

Hu Haoyuan was a recommendation-algorithm expert at Tmall. At the same time, Alipay R&D engineer Chu Xiaoying was “watching the red and green figures and lines jump around on the screen, like watching the stock market, getting excited and nervous along with them.” In a brief lull, he even went on Zhihu to answer a question: “What are Alibaba’s frontline staff doing right now?”

The atmosphere in Tmall’s Double 11 media broadcast room was restless, too. Shortly before midnight, the arrival of Alibaba Group COO Daniel Zhang and CMO Wang Shuai nearly set several camera operators arguing over positions. A cordon had to be put up around the main stage. Each time a key figure on the screen changed, reporters from more than 460 Chinese and overseas media outlets raised their phones or cameras.

In the fifth minute, as He Jiling completed her payment, Alipay hit its first transaction peak of this year’s Double 11. Despite repeatedly saying that it and the major banks had run ten intensive simulated stress tests a month earlier, payments briefly backed up, as they had in previous years. That minute saw 2.85 million transactions—more than three times last year’s peak of 790,000 transactions a minute.

He Jiling felt lucky. “Looks like our 5-megabit home connection really came through.” A recent graduate of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, she was working as a game planner at Shanda, though she had yet to complete formal onboarding. Born in the 1990s, she usually shopped on her phone. That night she stayed at her computer instead; somehow, it felt safer.

Plenty of people apparently felt otherwise. According to Tmall, mobile purchases accounted for about 70% of transaction value in the three minutes after midnight. Over the following 24 hours, the share remained between 40% and 50%.

Wang Xiaoxing missed none of these figures. An e-commerce analyst at Analysys International, he had begun preparing two weeks earlier. He needed to track post-midnight PC and mobile traffic, transaction volumes and other data from nearly every major e-commerce platform—Tmall, JD.com, Suning.com, Yihaodian and Dangdang among them. Because Tmall had added categories such as cars and travel this year, he also kept leaving his desk to confer with other analysts. “You’d have seen me running around the office the whole time. It’s a shame I had no time to buy anything. We’re witnesses, but we can’t take part.” He kept it up until 3 a.m.

After securing her coats, “Zhuliye” had meant to resume her work conversation, but her colleague was busy placing orders, too. So she washed up and went to bed. He Jiling, having bought everything on her list, started wondering whether to buy a 730-yuan camera bag. She knew little about cameras, so she asked a photography-loving friend for advice. The friend ended up buying a full-frame Sony a7 camera costing more than 10,000 yuan, payable in 11 interest-free installments. At 1:15 a.m., He Jiling decided to buy the bag, also in installments through Tmall. “It felt like I hadn’t spent a cent. It was great.” The unplanned purchase became the item she most wanted to arrive soon.

Tmall had introduced installment payments in July to compete with JD.com’s Baitiao credit service. Its usual options were three, six or nine installments; only the three-installment plan carried no fee. For this Double 11, however, it offered 11 installments with no fee: customers could buy with no down payment and repay over nearly a year without interest. That was why He Jiling felt she “hadn’t spent a cent.”

It was her first time using Tmall’s installment plan. “It really wasn’t much money. It just felt great.” She also tried Tmall Bao for the first time. Alibaba had launched the financial product on November 1; users could transfer in as little as 1 yuan, up to a maximum of 50,000 yuan. Alongside the returns offered by Yu’ebao, Tmall Bao promised an annualized 1% subsidy toward Tmall purchases.

(With its higher returns and red-envelope promotion, Tmall Bao, launched before Double 11, helped spread out the day’s payment demand)

Like He Jiling and “Zhuliye,” many people did not really understand Tmall Bao. What drew them was the chance to “transfer in 300 yuan for a red-envelope draw,” along with Tmall’s claim that paying with Tmall Bao at the Double 11 peak would be faster than other methods. “I actually paid with Yu’ebao. I think Tmall Bao might just be a gimmick,” said “Zhuliye.” She transferred in 300 yuan twice, then stopped when neither draw won her a red envelope. He Jiling tried several times and ended up with just 20 yuan in red envelopes.

Despite Tmall’s claim that Tmall Bao offered the fastest payment, quick pay still led on Double 11, accounting for 56.9% of total transaction value. Tmall Bao accounted for 7.3%, installment purchases 1.1%, and other payment channels, including online banking, just 0.7%. As with the introduction of direct Yu’ebao payments for Double 11 in 2013, Tmall Bao, installment payments and the collection of balances on preorders were ways to spread out a sudden flood of transactions. Double 11 was also an excellent chance to promote the new products.

After the first hour, some Alibaba employees began heading for the main gate, yawning and pulling suitcases. An unlicensed taxi driver, waiting until he had four passengers before leaving, complained about how late Alibaba staff worked while calling other drivers: “Get over to the Taobao City gate. There are fares to pick up.” Hu Haoyuan did not drive home until after 3 a.m.

In the Double 11 war room of ICBC headquarters’ technology department, Caesar Chan was still watching transaction data closely. He knew the ECC (Enterprise Control Center) departments at every bank would have their lights on all night. Like Chu Xiaoying, he was finding moments to answer a Zhihu question: “What tests do bank technology departments face on Double 11?”. Caesar Chan was his Zhihu username. “After midnight, banks’ offline transaction business has basically stopped,

and very few transactions enter the system through ATMs. For banks, it isn’t really a transaction peak.” In other words, after midnight almost the entire banking transaction system was available to support online Double 11 transactions, yet systems could still crash. Caesar Chan said that was because bank systems were built to prioritize transaction security, durable data storage, stability and later reporting and analysis. Alipay, by contrast, had been built from the start to handle many transactions at once. In terms of TPS—transactions per second, a measure of transaction authorization performance—Alipay’s peak was far higher than ICBC’s.

(ICBC is one of the few financial institutions in China capable of using IBM mainframes on a large scale; each year it pays an additional 10–15% in service fees)

ICBC had been preparing intensely since the start of November. From the 10th, it had to report transaction volumes at intervals and monitor its systems. Alipay gave each participating bank two figures: a minimum target and an expected target. Banks used them to add server capacity at critical points and run repeated stress tests, always leaving a safety margin. “Everything was waiting for the impact at midnight.”

Another traffic peak, noticed by fewer people, came at 6 a.m. That was when buyers of preordered goods from overseas on Tmall Global could begin paying their remaining balances. The total transaction-value curve, which had flattened after 2 a.m., made a small but distinct jump. At Costco alone—the American supermarket chain was taking part in Double 11 for the first time—customers bought 90 tons of salted mixed nuts and 204 tons of dried cranberries over the day. The German brand Brita sold 26,000 water-filter jugs and 32,000 filter cartridges.

Li Yi was much more relaxed. She did not “contribute” to any of the traffic peaks. Instead, during a break at work around 11 a.m. on the 11th, she opened her cart, saw that the Xiaomi TV 2 had not sold out and paid for one without rushing.

She had wanted the television for a month. With Double 11 approaching, she thought it might get cheaper and decided to wait. A few days before the sale, customer service told her there would be no discount—just 150 yuan saved on shipping—so she decided against staying up to buy it. She was mildly annoyed to find that, although she wanted black, the system had randomly assigned her a gold one. She asked customer service if she could change colors and received a reply saying no about two hours later. “I mean a reply from a person, not a preset automatic response.”

That afternoon, the first Double 11 report Wang Xiaoxing had helped write went up on his company’s website. It covered traffic data for e-commerce sites over the 12 hours after midnight.

(Xiaomi’s customer-service office in the early hours of November 11, 2014)

In the war room Xiaomi had set up at its headquarters for Double 11, Liu Qi was on edge. Even when he went to the bathroom, he told Xu Jieyun, a marketing colleague and the war-room leader, over the walkie-talkie: “I’ll be right back.” Liu Qi handled PR for Xiaomi’s e-commerce department. Since midnight, he had been recording the exact second sales passed milestones such as 100 million and 1 billion yuan so Xu Jieyun could relay the news to media outlets as quickly as possible. That was why they used walkie-talkies even though they were not far apart.

Xiaomi’s Beijing office had also prepared for an all-nighter. Camp beds were set out in advance in a basement meeting room, with a curtained area for female employees. Starting on the evening of November 10, the kitchen prepared five meals, including a “gold-medal late-night snack” for everyone at 2 a.m.: a Huang Taiji jianbing meal. About 4,000 employees in Xiaomi’s e-commerce-related departments worked through the night, including people in customer service, logistics, after-sales support, marketing, design and website development.

Xiaomi had a wide range of products in this year’s Double 11 sale: phones, televisions, tablets, fitness bands and accessories. “It felt like we passed 100 million yuan in the blink of an eye,” Liu Qi said. That blink lasted four minutes and 48 seconds after midnight.

In its first Tmall Double 11 the previous year, Xiaomi had taken the top spot for sales of an individual phone product, a result credited with helping the brand grow quickly. Perhaps other brands had noticed: Huawei, Meizu and Smartisan were among the Chinese phone makers taking part this year. All but Smartisan appeared in Tmall’s final top-ten ranking of stores by transaction value.

By noon, payments for the Xiaomi TV Li Yi bought had exceeded 100 million yuan. Xiaomi’s total sales had passed 1 billion yuan—another milestone Liu Qi needed to record down to the second.

Caesar Chan was just as tense. Around midday on Double 11, banks saw their highest transaction volumes of the day. TPS reached more than 90% of its highest level that year. How many transactions per second the technology could ultimately handle remained unknown, he said. The systems set a new mark each year, but nobody knew where the limit was.

After five years of Double 11, merchants and other participants had gained experience. Merchants could now estimate sales fairly accurately: average daily sales from October 15 to 30 were a useful guide, with Double 11 sales generally 50 to 100 times that figure.

The Braun electric toothbrush He Jiling bought was a bestseller at Braun’s official flagship store, whose warehouse was in Haining. On November 7, Shao Shuai, general manager of the store’s operating partner Suwang E-commerce, sent the final shipment of goods, worth 6 million yuan, back to the warehouse, completing preparations for this year’s Double 11. The company had stocked 90 times its usual daily sales. In addition to its existing 4,000-square-meter warehouse, it added 1,900 square meters of storage and around 70 part-time workers.

Xiaomi had spent almost half a year preparing its Double 11 inventory. Liu Qi said it was more accustomed than many merchants to such “big exams”: inside Xiaomi, Double 11 worked much like its Mi Fan Festival or even its weekly Tuesday sales day. Only the scale was different.

The logistics behind the sales had become a Double 11 contest of their own.

From October, Xiaomi and SF Express ran at least three drills to test how their servers would connect at peak load, so orders could ship quickly. According to Xiaomi, its first Double 11 phone order reached a buyer in Beijing at 6:50 a.m. on November 11, less than seven hours after sales began.

That was still well behind Tmall’s first delivery, at 12:15 a.m. It was a Homa refrigerator. Han Zuzheng, who headed Homa’s e-commerce business, was somewhat troubled by how widely the story spread; the media attention was not what he had intended. A person familiar with the matter told QDaily that Tmall had long made a point of announcing its first order and offered an internal logistics reward for it. Few merchants had paid much attention before. Homa hoped to turn “Tmall Double 11’s first order” into an advertising line for its flagship store, giving shoppers an impression of fast delivery and a better opinion of the brand.

Homa therefore arranged a buyer in advance, set aside the item for that order close to the warehouse and, once sales opened at midnight, pulled it out for delivery first. It got people talking, but Han Zuzheng declined the rush of media interview requests that followed.

Speed had become a selling point in e-commerce. JD.com had long hoped to use it to catch up with, or even surpass, Tmall. It had clearly become Double 11’s second-biggest player.

(After Double 11, a sorting area at a JD.com logistics center. One of the few e-commerce groups with fully self-operated logistics, JD.com spent years and nearly 10 billion yuan on the system)

At 12:56 a.m., a buyer in Shanghai received the Midea water heater he had ordered at 12:01:49 a.m. It was JD.com’s first Double 11 delivery.

“We called first to ask if he wanted us to bring it straight over. Partly we wanted to surprise him, and partly we wanted to show how efficient our delivery was.” After midnight, Tan Xiangming, head of operations management in JD.com’s delivery department, arrived at the first stop on his inspection route: the Qinghe station in Beijing. He needed to confirm once more that each station was ready, with vehicles and staff to receive goods in place.

He inspected six Beijing stations in succession and got home at 4 a.m. Three hours later, he drove to a temporary office in Yizhuang. Because of requirements connected to the APEC meeting, Beichen Shiji Center, home to JD.com’s headquarters, had been closed for a day. Nearly 4,000 JD.com employees had been moved to the temporary Yizhuang site from the morning of the 10th. The administration department had booked rooms at seven or eight nearby hotels to support Double 11.

Tan Xiangming worried most about system stability, though JD.com had stress-tested for a peak on the order of 10 million parcels that day. Fortunately, there were no major problems. Its logistics system ran around the clock. Under JD.com’s “211” service, orders placed by 11 a.m. arrive that afternoon. Ordinarily, the system pauses at 11 a.m. to process orders in a batch. For Double 11, that brief pause was eliminated: processing and shipping continued throughout the sale.

Tan Xiangming had begun preparing in early October, though he clearly remembered emailing the full Double 11 logistics plan to regional managers on September 30. With its Asia No. 1 facility in use, JD.com’s site utilization was roughly twice what it had been the year before. It had ordered 500 new Iveco vans and trucks, upgraded core sorting centers to matrix sorting equipment and changed conveyor lines from one level to two, boosting efficiency by 30%.

More than 32,000 people worked in JD.com’s Double 11 logistics and delivery system, including over 20,000 frontline couriers. Across the 14 delivery partners of Cainiao Network, 1.25 million couriers took part.

At 9 p.m. on the 11th, an SF Express courier covering the even-numbered addresses on Fengzhuang Road in Shanghai’s Jiading District found that his electric scooter had run out of power just as he was about to make his last delivery. He had to call the customer and promise to come the next morning. Usually, he covered the area alone. That day there were four or five couriers, but his load was still four times normal.

A YTO Express courier who mainly covered schools around Shanghai’s Wujiaochang saw one advantage: he could wait at set pickup points for students to collect their parcels. He normally handled about 70–80 a day; that day, the number reached around 200. At a nearby STO Express pickup point, parcel numbers doubled as well.

At the next 00:00, 24 hours later, the giant screen in Tmall’s Double 11 media room finally stopped updating. It froze on the figures: “Transaction value: 57.1 billion yuan. Mobile share: 42.6%. Countries and regions lit up: 271.” A new record had been set.

(Hours before Double 11 ended, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma answered reporters’ questions in the broadcast room)

“I really don’t have great expectations for the numbers. What worries me is the logistics afterward. Today’s part—the machines, the equipment, the buying—is relatively easy. The hardest part is the next few days,” Jack Ma said when he met the media, as usual, before Double 11 ended.

He had reason to think about it. The camera bag He Jiling had been waiting for did not arrive first, as she had hoped. It was a little bigger than she had imagined, though she was reasonably happy with it. The coat “Zhuliye” bought for more than 2,000 yuan arrived after she got to work at 9 a.m. on the 12th. She tried it on at once and found it a little small. “I spent the whole morning wondering whether to return it. In the end, it was such a bargain that I kept it.” She returned the other coat because it was taking “so long” to arrive and she worried that it, too, might be too small.

Would there be a wave of returns and exchanges? Beyond the gleaming sales figures, that was the data Alibaba, JD.com and every other e-commerce company caught up in Double 11 needed to watch after the first 24 hours. To some extent, it would show how healthy e-commerce really was.

Chu Xiaoying had worked through five Double 11 sales. “For people in our job, Double 11 is like the gaokao. I have to sit it again every year, and every year the questions get much harder.” Caesar Chan had watched two in a row. He told QDaily that Tmall’s Double 11 transaction value the previous year had failed to reach the minimum target Alipay gave banks in advance. This year it was well above the minimum, but still far short of the expected target.

Few people probably remembered that Double 11 was Singles’ Day. From 3 p.m. that day, Uber in Hangzhou was giving roses to single men and women who booked rides, up to 3,000 roses in all. Not many people seemed to know.

Next Double 11, after midnight, you may once again be awake—by choice or otherwise.