China's online shopping miracle

Express delivery in China has entered the digital era in a big way.

Tmall, the electronic commerce platform owned by Chinese tech-giant Alibaba, is where the November 11 shopping bonanza all takes place.

The Cainiao Network is a big-data logistics company, and part of the Alibaba family of companies. 

Backed by Cainiao's powerful management system, each barcode contains details of everything in the order. 

Billions of computations control location sensing, enabling automatic sorting, without the need for any human labor for handpicking. 

The "S-shape" sorting route through the warehouse streamlines order packaging, with all items ready to go.

The electronic brain of the warehouse guides robots that lift, queue and make way for each other. 

The November 11 Tmall shopping bonanza in 2016 notched up total sales of 120.7 billion Chinese Yuan, about 18 billion dollars, with 657 million orders to 253 countries and regions around the world. 

After 9 years, the November 11 phenomenon has made an astonishing international impact. Its relevance goes far beyond being simply a shopping spree, and has become an unprecedented act of human coordination.