This year’s Singles’ Day was the biggest one yet in China with the country’s biggest eCommerce players showing off impressive sales totals for the period.

Singles’ Day was originally created in the nineties for single people in China to celebrate being single – since it has become the biggest online and offline shopping day in the nation.

eCommerce giant Alibaba is one of the businesses that capitalises on this day and it did so this year by settling RMB168.2bn ($25.3bn/£19.4bn) of gross merchandise volume (GMV) through Alipay, a 39 per cent increase compared to 2016. In total, 90 per cent of Alibaba’s sales came through mobile, compared to 82 per cent last year.

In addition, the company’s Alipay payment platform processed 1.48bn total transactions – a 41 per cent increase from 2016 – with 256,000 transactions being processed per second at peak.

“More than $25bn of GMV in one day is not just a sales figure,” said Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group. “It represents the aspiration for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail.”

Meanwhile, JD.com – Alibaba’s ever-growing eCommerce rival – saw a per cent increase in sales from 2016, with Its transaction total reaching RMB127.1bn ($19.1bn/£14.6bn). Although, these figures relate to cumulative sales between 1 November and 11 November – showing it is a long way behind Alibaba, which amassed far more than that in a 24-hour period alone.