Staff members and journalists pose with the screen showing Alibaba's GMV of the Single's Day Global Shopping Festival at Shanghai Expo Centre in Shanghai, China.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said that its upcoming mega-shopping event will be the largest-ever in terms of "scale and reach" as it looks to continue growing what has become a multibillion-dollar sales day.

The event, which takes places on Nov. 11, is Alibaba's day of massive sales across all of its platforms and has been compared to Black Friday in the United States. Widely known as "Singles Day," the event is also known as the 11:11 shopping festival because of the date it takes place.

It's the 10th anniversary of the event, which was created by current Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang in 2009. Back then, Singles Day brought in $7.8 million in gross merchandise value. Total GMV generated in 2017 was $25.3 billion. In comparison, online sales for Black Friday in the U.S. racked up $5 billion last year, according to data from Adobe.

Alibaba did not offer any forecast for this year's sales.

On Friday, Alibaba officially kicked off the festival with an event in Beijing, China, where Zhang outlined how the company's so-called "new retail" strategy will help make this year's event be the largest ever "in terms of scale and reach," according to a press release.