Singles' Day: What is it, how much money is spent each year and is it bigger than Black Friday?

Many retailers and their customers are gearing up for the annual shopping bonanza that is Black Friday on 24 November. The huge number of discounts have become a fixture in the UK since the US phenomenon caught on here a few years ago.

But now there’s a shopping event you may not have heard of that dwarfs Black Friday. It’s called Singles’ Day and it’s happening this Saturday 11 November. Last year’s event accounted for several times the amount of sales made on Black Friday and this years it’s predicted to be bigger than ever.

For the uninitiated, here’s the lowdown on the world’s biggest shopping day.

E-commerce giant Alibaba began using the China’s Singles’ Day as a promotional event to get lonely Chinese consumers to shop.

Now, anyone, anywhere in the world can take advantage of the big discounts on offer by shopping online at sites like Alibaba’s AliExpress and have items shipped to them and the company is making a big push Alibaba, and other Chinese retailers like JD.com have marked down goods by as much as 55 per cent, though obviously delivery times will be longer than for a product shipped from the UK.

Alibaba says 140,000 brands, including 60,000 international labels, will offer up over 15 million product listings this year. Though the event officially starts on Saturday, shoppers can pre-order before to lock in the discounted price. Alibaba said last year that deals offered by Nike, Apple and Siemens were among the most popular.

Singles’ Day has now also become a marketing event for some of the world’s biggest celebrities. Last year’s star-studded televised opening event included appearances from basketball legend Kobe Bryant, as well as David and Victoria Beckham. This week’s event in Shanghai will feature Maria Sharapova and Pharrell Williams, among a host of other stars.

Singles' Day apparently started as a non-commercial event in the early 1990s as a backlash against the cultural pressure to marry and a celebration of the single life - a sort of antidote to Valentine’s Day.

It takes its name from the way the date is written numerically as 11/11, which resembles “bare branches,” a Chinese expression for being single. It serves as an occasion for the unattached to party with other single friends.

In the same way that Hallmark seized on Valentine’s Day to sell cards, Alibaba saw the event as a great opportunity to get people to buy almost anything.

Huge. One estimate from US bank Citigroup reckons sales will hit 158bn yuan ($23.8bn) over 24 hours. Alibaba is the driving force behind the event and the company said last year it racked up a record 121bn yuan ($18bn; £14bn) all on its own. That was up almost a third on 2015, although it didn't quite hit the heights of $20bn some had predicted. Some have also questioned the accuracy of the e-commerce giant’s figures, according to the BBC.

This year Alibaba plans to increase sales even further by integrating offline with online. In the run-up to 11 November, Alibaba has helped 600,000 small shops upgrade their systems to track inventory more effectively, Bloomberg reports. Those retailers will then become delivery and storage centers which will allow Alibaba to ship more goods.

Singles’ Day is far bigger than the Black Friday weekend is in the US. Figures from Adobe show that shoppers spent $3.34bn on Black Friday itself and a total of $12.8bn over the five-day period from Thanksgiving through to the following monday, known as Cyber Monday.