Singles Day, the world's biggest shopping extravaganza, seemed set to break records again as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba - the extravaganza's driving force - beat last year's record with eight hours of shopping left to go on Sunday.
The company had sold $24.3 billion worth of merchandise by 3:53 pm (0753 GMT), according to the South China Morning Post.
A massive screen at Alibaba's gala in Shanghai showed the surging sales numbers in real time: At 2 minutes and 5 seconds after midnight, 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion) in purchases had been made on Alibaba's platforms. By the 1 hour and 47 minute mark, that number had increased tenfold.
Online shoppers spent more than $14 billion within the first two hours of the annual buying frenzy, once again breaking records as the consumer tradition enters its 10th year.
Early sales figures are an indication that China's ongoing trade war with the United States has done little to dent domestic consumption so far.
"This year's 'double eleven', in terms of the size of consumption, data, I think should be successful. There is now a saying that 'winter is coming' for the economy," said He Xiaoyu, a lecturer at the Central University of Finance and Economics, referring to Singles Day by its nickname 11.11, or November 11.
"There are a lot of bearish voices, which led people to tighten their belts and give up buying during the double 11. I don't think this will happen."
In the lead-up this year's event, there were concerns that Alibaba and other e-commerce sites like JD.com, which runs a similar sale, may be hit hard by new tariffs on U.S. goods.
Washington imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods since the trade war began in July, while Beijing has imposed tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. goods in retaliation.
Singles Day began as a spoof event celebrated by unattached Chinese university students in the 1990s. Singles Day has been a fixture in China since Alibaba turned the "holiday" - meant to deride single people - into a shopping extravaganza by offering deep discounts on a range of products from electronics to travel packages.
Other companies have since followed suit and, in 2015, Singles Day surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, two of the largest shopping days in the United States.
The Twitter-like Weibo platform was blanketed with Singles Day-related posts on Sunday, from users proudly proclaiming that they had resisted the shopping urge this year to those who cheerfully listed an array of mundane purchases.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who will step down as chairman in less than a year, attended the start of the gala in Shanghai and appeared in a video message in which he wrapped up live hair crabs, a popular online purchase.
Singles Day "is not a day of discounts, but rather a day of gratitude," Ma said in the video. "It's when retailers use the best products and best prices to show their gratitude to our consumers."
Chinese e-commerce platforms have come under fire in the past for peddling low-quality and counterfeit items. Hong Tao, an economics professor at Beijing Technology and Business University, said Singles Day encourages shoppers to prioritize cheap prices over high quality, causing them to purchase items they don't need.
"People are swept up in the festivities," Hong said in a phone interview. "This burst of consumption, confined to just one day, can be exhausting for both buyers and sellers."
The occasion also has big environmental implications.
While both Alibaba and competitor JD.com have pledged to use biodegradable packaging to cut down on waste, research conducted this month by Greenpeace East Asia said many plastics marked "biodegradable" and used by Chinese e-retailers can only break down under high temperatures in facilities that are limited in number across the country.
Greenpeace estimated that by 2020, "biodegradable" packaging could produce roughly 721 truckloads of trash in China every day.
