11.11: What Singles' Day Is, and How to Prepare

What is 11.11?

It started as a joke. In 1993, four single male students in a dorm at Nanjing University decided that 11 November should be a day for celebrating being single rather than quietly minding it. The date was the punchline: the numeral 1 looks like a bare stick, and guānggùn — "bare stick" — is Chinese slang for an unmarried man. Four ones, four singles. The name, 光棍节 (guānggùn jié), is usually translated as the bare sticks festival.

It spread through other Nanjing campuses during the nineties as a student thing: an anti-Valentine's, with the traditional gesture being to buy yourself something because nobody else was going to.

That last part is the detail that made it worth billions.

How a dorm joke became the biggest shopping day on earth

In 2009, Alibaba — under Daniel Zhang, later its CEO — took the holiday and turned it into a 24-hour online discount event. The first one had 27 brands and did 50 million yuan, about US$10 million. A modest promotion to fill the dead retail stretch between October's Golden Week and Chinese New Year.

Then it compounded. By 2012 it was US$3bn in a day. By 2017, US$25bn. The last year Alibaba published an exact figure was 2021: RMB 540.3 billion, around US$84.5 billion, in 24 hours.

Why it caught on outside China

Two reasons, and neither is romantic. It sits in the gap before Christmas shopping properly starts, and — for anyone outside China — it is the one sale where ordering early is not optional, because the parcel has to cross the world.

AliExpress is the version of 11.11 most of the world actually meets, and it has pulled other retailers along: MediaMarkt runs it in Germany, and the Nordic chains have since the late 2010s. It is not universally comfortable — in Belgium, MediaMarkt's 11.11 promotion drew criticism because 11 November is the Armistice anniversary, which is a public day of remembrance across much of Europe.

When exactly is the 2026 sale?

11 November is fixed — that is the festival, and it does not move. The sale window around it is a different question, and here is the honest answer: as of mid-October 2026, AliExpress has not published its 2026 dates.

That is worth saying plainly, because the pages ranking for this question give confident ranges that contradict each other. Some coupon sites state a warm-up on 8–10 November and a main sale running 11–19 November. AliExpress's own sale-dates page estimates 1–15 November. All of them are labelled "expected", and they cannot all be right.

What has been consistent in past years is the shape rather than the dates: a short warm-up in the days before, the peak on the 11th itself, and a tail after. Plan around the 11th, and check the platform directly in the first days of November for the real window.

11.11 or Black Friday?

They are 16 days apart in 2026 — 11 November against Friday 27 November — which makes this a real decision rather than a trivia question.

The split that actually matters is shipping. A standard AliExpress parcel is a weeks-long proposition, not a days-long one. Order on 11.11 and a Christmas present has a comfortable margin. Order the same thing on Black Friday and you are relying on it, and in December you are relying on it during the heaviest freight period of the year.

So the rough rule: anything coming from overseas, buy at 11.11. Anything from a local retailer, wait for Black Friday. Buying a long-haul parcel in the Black Friday window because the banner is louder is how people end up explaining an empty box on Christmas morning.

What's actually worth buying

AliExpress is excellent at a specific shape of purchase: low-stakes, high-markup-elsewhere, not urgent. It is poor at the opposite. Being clear about which is which saves more money than any coupon.

Where it genuinely wins:

• Cables, chargers and power banks — the category with the most absurd high-street markup, and the one where a generic is usually the same factory.
• Phone cases and accessories — disposable by nature, so brand matters least.
• Smart home bits — plugs, sensors, strips. Check the protocol works with what you already own before the sale, not after.
• Craft and hobby supplies — beads, yarn, tools, findings. Bulk pricing that local shops cannot approach.
• Christmas decorations — the timing is the whole point: buy on 11.11 and it arrives while it is still useful.
• Stocking fillers and small gifts — the sub-$10 bracket where shipping cost normally kills the idea.

Why you build the basket before, not during

11.11 discounts are usually a stack, not a single number: a platform coupon on top of a store coupon on top of a seller discount, with thresholds like spend-X-get-Y. Working out whether a stack is worth anything takes a few minutes per item — minutes you do not have while a countdown runs and stock moves.

The fix is unglamorous and it is the only one that works: decide what you want now, and write down what it costs now. A price you recorded in October cannot be rewritten in November, and it is the only honest benchmark you will have. Every "-70%" on the night is a claim about a number the seller chose.

Two more things that are easier a month out than on the night: compare the same item across a few sellers, since AliExpress listings are frequently the same product at different prices — and check the seller's review count rather than just the star rating.

Make it a list, not a basket

A basket is private, it expires, and nobody can help you with it. If what you are stocking up on is partly gifts — and in November it usually is — a list does a job a basket cannot.

Our wishlist takes a link from any shop, AliExpress included, and fills in the title, picture and the price at that moment. That price is a snapshot from the day you added it, not live tracking, which is precisely what makes it the benchmark: come the 11th, you compare the sale price against your own October number rather than against the seller's crossed-out one.

And because it is not tied to one retailer, the AliExpress things sit next to the local-shop things in one place — which is what a November list really looks like. Share the link and whoever is buying for you reserves an item with one tap and no account; everyone else sees it is taken, so nothing gets bought twice. You never see who took what.

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