Nov.11 cemented its status as China’s busiest online shopping day this year. Single’s Day, or “11.11” — four singles, was established by Chinese college students in the 1990s as an alternative Valentine’s Day on which single people can celebrate treat each other to gifts.

Gift-giving helped turn it into a major shopping event as sellers of everything from jewelry to TVs to cars saw a marketing opportunity and launched Singles Day sales, according to the Washington Post.

On Nov. 11 this year, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, the money spent on Chinese shopping websites amounted to 100 years of U.S. President Barack Obama’s salary.

Shenzhen Daily reported that many shopping websites offered special discounts to mark the occasion and saw a hugely successful day as a result.

THE transaction volume on Tmall, Alibaba’s B2C subsidiary, and taobao.com, the country’s largest online shopping Web site and run by Alibaba, had reached 10 billion yuan (US$1.57 billion) through just 12 hours on Nov. 11, Tmall said on its micro blog.

A Shenzhen seller of iPhone cases, through taobao, said the business added staff for the promotion.

Various other activities were held in the PRD to mark the occasion.

Nine couple’s who tied the knot in Foshan had their wedding photos taken at the city’s Yida Textiles Factory, Asia’s largest textiles factory, where they are employed. Southern Metropolis Daily was there to capture the couples’ special day.

A matchmaking event was held for mainlanders who studied in Hong Kong involving 50 boys and 50 girls who were hoping to say goodbye to their single status, according to Nanfang Daily.

A survey was conducted in Foshan to see why there were so many lonely hearts in the PRD’s thriving cities. In the survey conducted on 680 blue collar workers, it was revealed that 2 in 3 were single, and many men said that finding a girlfriend was harder than finding a good job.

The most common reason cited for failure to find a partner was that they did not earn enough money to attract anyone. Other reasons included that their jobs were too time-consuming or that they seldom had the chance to meet members of the opposite sex in their work.

Moreover, 24% of respondents said they had never been in love and a further 31% had only been in one relationship. A survey conducted in Dongguan saw similar results.

So, shopping websites can look forward to next year.