Elizabeth Weise

USATODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — The world’s biggest sale began at midnight Beijing time on Friday when Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched its Singles' Day shopping festival.

But perhaps more importantly, this year Smucker's is using the event to introduce China's more than 1.3 billion consumers to the joys of peanut butter and jelly.

Alibaba's online marketplace sale began at 11:00 a.m. EDT. It posted $1 billion in sales within the first five minutes, the company reported.

In the first hour, order volume reached a record-breaking 175,000 orders per second, according to Clavis Insight. Total sales in the first two hours passed $5 billion, with 84% of sales coming from mobile devices.

The company has hosted a sale on Nov. 11 for seven years now. Last year Alibaba (BABA) booked sales of $14.3 billion on Singles' Day.

This year, it's estimated the company could sell as much as $20 billion worth of goods, a 40% year-over-year increase over last year, according to New York-based research firm Fung Global Retail & Technology.

The sale is mainly aimed at shoppers in China and Asia. Close to 100,000 brands, 11,000 of them from outside China, will be selling orders on the site, said Alibaba.

It's also a big target for U.S. retailers looking to reach Chinese consumers. Last year the United States was the top seller of imported goods, Alibaba said. Overseas brands accounted for 10% of Singles' Day purchases in 2015.

Apple, Levis and peanut butter and jelly

Top sellers so far this year included the iPhone 7, Beats headphones and Dyson branded products, according to Clavis.

Levis. One of this year's big additions is Smucker’s, which is positioning itself on two marketing axes, American lifestyle and health.

The 119-year-old company began selling jam, peanut butter, nuts and coffee on Alibaba’s business-to-consumer store Tmall in December, so this is its first time at 11.11.

While the company’s old ad, “with a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good” might have resonated with Americans who grew up eating PB&J, the entire concept is a new one to the Chinese.

Instead of pushing straight for a sandwich in a lunchbox, never a part of a traditional Chinese diet, Smucker’s will be promoting recipes that slowly bring the unfamiliar ingredients into the Chinese kitchen.

That includes recipes that integrate jam and peanut butter such as pineapple pork, and steaks or salmon with accompanying sauces.

Another push is home baking, which is only now beginning to gain traction with younger Chinese families, according to John Pawlowski, vice president of Asia Pacific at Smucker's. That includes peanut butter cupcakes for the mid-autumn festival, which in Chinese culinary tradition is focused more on small pastry cakes stuffed with sweet red bean paste or lotus seed paste.

Smucker’s is touting its jam as a healthier alternative to Chinese jam, which is often of low quality and made almost entirely of sugar. Smucker’s ads will emphasize that its jams are more than 50% fruit.

VR, American stars and a broader reach

This year Alibaba is also offering shoppers the chance to make virtual, 360-degree shopping trips to foreign stores that include Macy’s, Costco and Target using a special virtual reality shopping program called Buy+.

The sales event launched with a four-hour, star-studded live TV show that counted down to midnight in Shenzhen. Last year the variety show was watched by around 100 million viewers. This year it was produced by David Hill, known for producing the Academy Awards and several Super Bowls.

This year's show featured not just China's hottest stars but many from America, including former Los Angeles Laker player Kobe Bryant and the pop band One Direction.

Alibaba leads world's biggest online shopping spree

Singles' Day has spread far beyond China, with sales events now going on in 20 countries.

It’s having the most success globally in countries where Alibaba’s international wing, AliExpress, is successful, said Lily Varon, a global e-commerce analyst with Forrester Research.

“It’s already a massive top e-commerce site in Russia, Brazil and Spain, all areas where consumers are now accustomed to shopping from a Chinese site,” said Varon.

In China, Singles' Day has taught buyers to expect “aggressive” discounts on items, said Varon.

“The precedent has been set for consumers wanting discounts of upward of 50%, to the point that Chinese authorities are looking into retailers inflating prices in the weeks prior to the shopping day, so they can cut on Nov. 11,” she said.

In the U.S., AliExpress

Alibaba's non-Chinese sales portal is called AliExpress. While it has a U.S. presence, the site has remained a bit player in the American e-commerce scene.

While Singles' Day has proved highly successful with U.S. brands wanting to sell to Chinese consumers, it hasn’t become a shopping event for U.S. consumers.

That’s partly because Amazon and others already occupy much of the e-commerce space and partly because Nov. 11 is too close to Christmas to get much traction as a separate shopping holiday.

In addition, Singles Day falls on Veterans Day, a holiday honoring military veterans that the United States has celebrated since the end of World War I in 1918.

Creating a shopping event out of whole cloth is no easy task, said Varon. Amazon did it with Prime Day, held in July. Many believe the idea was borrowed from Singles Day. However, even on its home turf, Amazon struggled to make Prime Day a "thing" with consumers. “It was rocky at first,” she said.

First, it was Bachelor's Day

Singles Day began as an obscure Valentine's Day-like holiday in the 1990s among university students in Nanjing.

The date, 11-11, was chosen because it is made up of 1's, or singles. What started as a day for bachelors to gather with friends and meet new people originally broadened to include women and be a general "meet possible mates" day.

Singles' Day is the Chinese translation of 光棍节, Guānggùn Jié, or "bare branches holiday." Bare branches is a Chinese term for bachelors because they have not yet married and had children, or 'borne fruit.'

In 2009 Alibaba rebranded 11-11 it as a day for unmarried people to buy items they wanted for themselves or for friends, rather than waiting for a wedding and the cascade of presents it traditionally involves.