Staff members transport packages at a logistics center in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, Nov. 11, 2021. With orders pouring in at midnight Wednesday, this year's Singles' Day shopping spree peaked on multiple e-commerce platforms in China. (Xinhua/Zhang Haoran)

The annual Singles' Day shopping festival, launched by Alibaba's e-commerce platform, enters its 12th year. Let'stake a glimpse ofthis year's event.

Chinese consumers snap up goodies on Singles' Day shopping fest

This year marks the largest Singles' Day shopping festival on Tmall, with a record 290,000 brands participating and more than 14 million types of commodities offering discounts, according to the company.

From Nov. 1 to 12:45 a.m. Thursday, sales of 411 small and medium brands with turnover exceeding 1 million yuan (about 156,000 U.S. dollars) during last year's event on Tmall, surpassed the 10-million yuan threshold.

The number of brands that saw a turnover of more than 100 million yuan on Tmall reached 382 during the period, including Huawei, Apple and Chinese sportswear brand Erke.

"The sales are crazy," said Shen Donglai, co-founder of domestic cosmetics brand SpaChina, which is participating in the Singles' Day shopping festival for the third time.

Between 8 p.m. Wednesday and 2:09 p.m. Thursday, the total value of orders on JD.com, another Chinese e-commerce giant, hit a new record of over 311.4 billion yuan.

This is also the greenest Singles' Day shopping festival on JD.com, which introduced various measures, including developing recyclable packaging, deploying new-energy cargo vans and using photovoltaic power generation in warehousing, to lower carbon emissions and the impact on environment. As a result, the amount of carbon emissions slashed stood at 26,000 tonnes as of Thursday noon.