Excitement grows as clock ticks down to Nov 11 shopping festival

Initiated by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's Taobao platform in 2009, "Singles' Day", on Nov 11, is now China's largest shopping festival and arguably the retail industry's most important 24 hours of the year, according to a recent report by the consumer research group Zenith Optimedia.

The study showed 36.11 percent of people born in the 1990s are even now willing to go without sleep during the event, in the hope of grabbing a bargain.

That makes the shopping splurge more attractive, said respondents, than the Soccer World Cup (for which 30.56 percent said they would stay awake) or even their favorite South Korean drama (33.33 percent).