Hacker News Reader

Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

It's still a hugely significant number. $18B is $13.20USD for every man, woman and child in China. Considering China's GDP is $8000USD, that's basically 60% of a single day's earnings for every person in China being spent at just one company in 12 hours.

It would be the same as everyone in the US spending $100 on the same day or $32B in a single day (which is almost half of US online spending for a year).

View on HN

US consumers spend over $32 billion every day of the year. The average American adult spends $57,000 per year as of 2016. The consumer economy in the US is around $13 trillion.

http://www.businessinsider.com/13-trillion-us-consumer-getti...

China's GDP is $11.x trillion for 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

That's a bit of a misleading stat since most consumer spending is on stuff like housing/transportation/food/utilities.

That's not misleading at all. That's how consumer spending is measured. How would you go about explaining that water, electricity and food are not consumption goods, but an iPad is?

It's misleading here because it has nothing really to do with Alibaba or Amazon; of course there are differences in cost of living in the USA and China, the interesting figure here is online spending, or luxury spending, etc.

It's misleading because nobody is buying water or electricity or paying rent on Alibaba today for 11.11.

Comparing apples to apples would mean comparing the amount spent online in the U.S. with a single company. Even comparing apples to pears would mean comparing all online sales in the U.S. to Alibaba 11.11 sales.

Comparing all "consumer spending" in the U.S. with Alibaba 11.11 sales is, well, it's misleading.

Your numbers on US online spending are way off. US online spending was about $400B in 2016. In 2017 Amazon alone has posted about 120B in revenue (low 100s minus AWS) year to date with guidance for 55-60B in Q4 alone.

AliExpress is huge in Russia and CIS countries and that contributes a lot to the sales volume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com