Monday was Singles' Day in China, the country's busiest online shopping day of the year. More than 35 billion yuan was spent on two online platforms, Tmall.com and Taobao.com, which are owned by China's e-commerce giant Alibaba. A total of 170 million transactions were made during the day.

Alibaba says sales at Tmall and Taobao hit 100 million yuan in the first 55 seconds of the day, with more than 13 million buyers placing orders. Within an hour, sales had risen to 6.7 billion yuan. By one o'clock in the afternoon, sellers on the two trading platforms had already beaten last year's sales record of 19 billion yuan.

More than 20,000 sellers on the platforms promised massive discounts, mostly half off, across 30,000 brands.

In addition, Alibaba has worked with a number of bricks-and-mortar retailers to allow consumers to try out their products before making a purchase on Tmall. This has also encouraged online sales.