Photo: Courtesy of Alibaba

The Double 11 (November 11) shopping festival, China's biggest annual online shopping spree topped China's social media rankings on Monday as the annual shopping spree kicks off for another year.

The hashtag "paying the account due" hit China's Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo with over 270 million views and over 44,000 posts as of press time.

According to the rules laid out by major e-commerce platforms including Alibaba and JD during Double 11, users just need to pay an initial deposit to gain access to discounts, with the remaining amount due before a designated deadline. 

This year the first sales period on E-commerce giant JD began at 8 pm on Sunday and more than 190 million pieces of goods were sold on the platform within four hours, according to current data. As of 10 pm on Sunday, more than one million consumers across the country had received their packages. 

Alibaba's Tmall which kicked off the first wave of sales period at 12 am on Monday, has not released buying data yet.

Within four hours after the sales began on JD, hot items including 3C products were sold out. The transactions for Apple soared over 200 percent year-on-year and sales for high-end laptops were up by 340 percent. Transactions from Xiaomi, OPPO and VIVO all outperformed last year's numbers within one hour, according to news release by JD.

Major E-commerce platforms have all planned a larger scale event this year. 

Alibaba Group said in a statement sent to the Global Times that this year marks the largest festival to date, with a record 290,000 brands participating and more than 14 million discount deals.

JD announced it will offer more than 400 million new products and more than 700 million domestically designed and produced fashion commodities to drive up growth in new categories.

The number of brands and vendors involved in the JD Double 11 event is both larger than in previous years, especially the number of fashion brands. It is expected that this year's promotion will see a 100-percent sales growth in 1,200 new categories compared with last year and boost the sale of high-quality agricultural products worth more than 30 billion yuan ($4.68 billion), the company said.

Global Times