One month ago, the before relatively-unknown concept of ‘Singles Day’ burst onto the scene, when the annual shopping frenzy in China broke headlines by becoming the largest shopping day in the world by sales volume. It easily surpassed even Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with one platform alone, Alibaba, raking in over $14.3 billion in sales. Singles Day, held on 11.11, was followed exactly one month and one day later by another shopping extravaganza, 12.12.

12.12 garnered nationwide attention in China with its promise of 50% of millions of items when bought with mobile payment system, Alipay, but it didn’t quite garner the headlines that its predecessor did. So to give you the lowdown, here are 12 things that you should know about 12.12:

It’s artificial. Be under no illusions — 12.12, like 11.11, is a very new event. Both of them were created by different branches of the Alibaba Group in the recent past and this was only the second year that 12.12 has been formally ‘held’. It has a different target. Whereas the Alibaba retail platform is the main driving force behind the 11.11 event and focuses on enabling larger brands, Alipay (China’s leading mobile payment solution) is the driving force behind 12.12 and focuses much more on smaller e-tailers and offline shops who get little benefit from the November event. It is also about increasing their own visibility in a time when they are being eclipsed in some circles by WeChat Wallet from rival corporation Tencent. It’s growing really fast. Some 300,000 offline merchants participated in this year’s event. That’s up from just 20,000 last year — a 15 times increase. It’s a great deal for merchants. Many offline merchants were offered not only half of their discount returned to them by Alipay, but a deal offering no transaction fees in 2016, in return for participating in the sale. It’s not just for smaller retailers though. Big brands were involved heavily as well — KFC, McDonalds, Carrefour, Wal-Mart, Family Mart, 7/11 and Uniqlo were among the stellar names making up the list this year. It’s not just in China. Stores in Australia, Thailand, Korea and Japan were included in this year’s 12.12 sale, in addition to the Chinese shopping hotspots of Hong Kong and Macau. Alipay ramped up international cooperation this year in order to position itself as the payment solution of choice for traveling Chinese. It’s even in Taiwan. In a showing of closer economic ties, stores in Taiwan this year also participated in the event — in addition to huge departments stores in Taipei, the famed eateries along the Ningxia Night Market also accepted Alipay and gave 50% off. It made money for customers. Taobao, owned by the same parent company, offered cash rewards to its customers as part of the event — users of mobile Taobao who created personal shopping lists and shared them to their friends, received cash payments direct to their Alipay accounts (think sales commissions) if their friends bought items on the shared lists. It sparked a new trending word. This year saw a determined effort on the part of Chinese consumers to plan out an entire day of eating, drinking, shopping, and entertainment, moving from discount to discount — leading to a new phrase coined to describe them: ‘Double 12 Strategists’ (双十二攻略) Its scale of participation is huge. While we have few accurate estimates of sales volume, we already have good estimates of participation — 28,000,000 people participated in buying vouchers and discount coupons online, and an extra 30,000,000 people used Alipay’s 12.12 deal in physical stores. It was great for memberships. Alipay and its partner service Koubei added 19,500,000 new members on 12.12 It was a great day for movie theaters. 50,000,000 movie tickets were sold on 12.12, with 1.5 million of them sold on Taobao alone.

The huge number of smaller and offline retailers participating this year means that actual dollar figures will come in much slower than they did for Singles Day. But the numbers above give a glimmer of what is likely to be an unimaginably massive total when all is added up. If it’s as big as early estimates suggest, expect the media to be squarely focused on both of the sister events next year as examples of what can happen when the impressive purchasing power of Chinese consumers is herded and then unleashed.

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