The future about Alibaba

As a Chinese person, I like Alibaba’s performance. Alibaba became the most popular destination for online shopping, in the world’s fastest growing e-commerce market. I do not know what the limit of Alibaba is, but if Alibaba wants to be the best, they must need to get rid of restrictions from China. As I’ve mentioned already, Alibaba’s primary money making operations are from operations within China, this ratio is about 80%. Then, let’s look at Alibaba’s biggest competitor, Amazon. Amazon’s business comes from outside North America can get 40%. Amazon has the better track record of expanding outside their home market. This is the reason that why Amazon’s can get the higher reputation in the International market. About the future, Alibaba has a stranglehold on the Chinese market and Amazon is the undisputed US leader. This is definitely an unprecedented competition; they both have such a massive head start, and an intimate understanding of their market and models. It will be especially interesting to see how Amazon addresses Alibaba’s rise, and what their next move will be.

Reference:

http://www.ecommercefuel.com/alibaba-vs-amazon/

Alibaba made the world’s biggest online shopping day

This is a very interesting case, as a Chinese person, we all know that what will happen in November 11 each year. This is a special holiday; we call it “Singles Day” which means this is Single people’s festival. Thanks to the marketing smarts of China’s Alibaba Group. Every years Alibaba offers discounts promotions on its 11.11 Shopping Festival to encourage China’s unattached to treat themselves something nice. Alibaba understand what Chinese person psychology is, and use them. Alibaba knows how to pull off a sale. China’s biggest e-commerce site reported $9.3 billion in revenue on Tuesday during the Chinese celebration of Singles Day, a 62 percent surge from last year’s previous record of $5.75 billion. That led to the Chinese Singles Day became the world’s biggest online shopping day. Alibaba aims to make Singles Day a global event within the next three to four years, said JP Morgan analyst Alex Yao. I think this is possible; because there is no doubt that have a big profit here. Alibaba will attract more businesses to enter their mall in the future.

Reference：

http://www.cnet.com/news/alibaba-breaks-singles-day-sales-record/

The quality of service has become the key of success

How to improve the quality of service has been one of the issues which cannot be avoided. Since Alibaba completed the listing, Yun ma has been emphasizing the importance of service. I think Taobao is not good in this case. Many Taobao’s sellers are irresponsible and cheat, and these are my personal experience. Taobao also has good seller, but bad sellers will more easily to impact Alibaba’s share price. So, Yun ma led the Alibaba established integrated customer service unit. The new department was formed in line with Alibaba’s policy of putting customers before employees and shareholders, leading to a level of customer service which industry insiders say is much higher than its domestic peers, according to the Beijing-based China Entrepreneur magazine. That was a good start, because their customer complaints are inevitable in view of the huge amount of transactions on Alibaba platforms such as Taobao, which ships more than 30 million parcels daily. Learn to deal with these issues is the primary task of Alibaba.

Reference：

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20141007000032&cid=1206

Alibaba trials drone delivery service in China

Delivery service has been one of the advantages of Alibaba. They had a good partnership with SF Express which is Chinese best express company. SF Express has won many honors in China, and they let Alibaba become the best online shopping company, at that time. Now, Alibaba has developed a new plan which called drone delivery. The three-day, three-city test of the system began in Beijing, with deliveries being made from a single merchant operating through Alibaba’s Amazon-like Taobao Marketplace website. I think this is an interesting program, it is very novelty. But it also has weak point; it is the lack of safety and practicality, and it requires higher operating experience. Interestingly, Alibaba abandoned cooperation with SF Express this time. They chose YTO Express as their partner, which filed flight plans with aviation authorities and is otherwise managing logistics. I do not know this decision is good or not, YTO Express may have better technology which SF Express doesn’t have.

Reference：

http://www.gizmag.com/alibaba-drone-delivery/35934/

Alibaba Launched Tmall International

Tmall is a shopping platform which is an important step that helps Alibaba into the world. Taobao is the basis for the success of Alibaba, but Taobao cannot help Alibaba get success in the world. According to my previous analysis, Taobao had many disadvantages such as fakes and service. These factors have become obstacles, Alibaba have to find another way to solve the problem. So, Alibaba Group launched Tmall International wich is a site dedicated for business entities outside China, where overseas brands and merchants can sell their products directly to Chinese online shoppers. Tmall already has a good foundation in China, they have authentic quality assurance. The newly launched international platform also provides genuine products in overseas markets. More than 140 foreign merchants from the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, etc. have settled on the platform. This is a great achievement as a new online shopping platform, and Alibaba now need to do is to solve the negative impact which come from Taobao (fakes and service). Tmall is a good start, even though it is not yet mature. What is Alibaba’s next?

Reference：

http://technode.com/2014/02/24/alibaba-launched-tmall-international-an-e-commerce-site-for-overseas-products/

Alipay will affect the payments system in the future?

We all know that eBay has a nice payment platform which called PayPal, and now we also can find a good payment platform in China, we can call it Alipay which belong to the Alibaba group. China is in the midst of a mobile commerce boom, according to a new report from Alipay, the Alibaba-affiliated payments service that handles more than 80 million transactions per day. When I was learning how to shop online, I already know Alipay. Alibaba spent a lot of time on Alipay for the advertisement, obviously, that was a successful plan. Now, Alipay which has over 300 million registered users and more 190 million downloads of its wallet app. This result was very gorgeous; I think they have good potential, and this thing helped their listing plans. Alibaba may be about to take a new concept for the payment system, and this new attempt called “Smile To Pay”. Users could soon be able to pay by scanning their face with a smartphone. I think this is a good plan, if Alibaba group can attract Apple for the cooperation, then they will be able to receive more attention.

Reference：

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102506106

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/08/alibabas-alipay-now-sees-over-half-of-its-transactions-in-china-from-mobile-devices/

An awkward fact

No companies are perfect; even it has a good foundation. With that being said, Alibaba is such a huge market, millions sellers and billions customers have been constituting the largest E-commerce in the world. Here is the problem: “Many brands say Alibaba’s sites — particularly Taobao — are rife with counterfeits.” With the experience as Chinese, we use Taobao to purchase all kinds of goods all the time. Frankly, this problem has occurred when Jack Ma’s team constructed Taobao at the first time back to 1999. There was too many factors that make this problem cannot be solved for this many years, and it will not be solved completely forever. For the following paragraph, I will talk about this from my point of view.

China is the world’s largest factory for last three decades. Manufactories in China produce almost everything and export those commodities to all over the world. I mean everything included counterfeits, because there has a real market and real needed by some customers. Like Jack Ma said in an interview; there are so many guys expecting to get a Rolex watch for a hundred bucks, and they also complain that they bought fake products in Taobao all the times. This is a funning point isn’t it?  I think this is kind of explaining how this happened. Because of there is a market and customers, simple like that.

Reference：

http://projects.wsj.com/alibaba/

Alibaba’s weapon

If we want to study the success of Alibaba, we must focus on Taobao. Taobao is Alibaba’s biggest shopping site; almost all Chinese people are using it. We all know that China is a big country which has so many people, according to population statistics; China has about 1.3 billion population. Undoubtedly, this is a very big market, and Alibaba found that. The Internet is popular at that time; Alibaba launched Taobao as their primary business and got success. Today, Taobao currently holds 96 percent market share in China. Taobao has not officially entered the world market, even Alibaba has been completed their listing plan in the United States. So, when Taobao complete their development in the international market, their future will be considerable. We have to mention eBay in this case, because they are so similar. Actually, Taobao has thrown eBay to the backside. “There is only one big winner, so eBay has failed,” said Paul A. Pavlou, professor of management information systems at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. One of the fundamental reason is that the Chinese market. China has developed right now, and Alibaba has completely captured the opportunity.

Reference：

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/why-ebay-failed-in-china-taobao-swift-guanxi-60072

The Man Behind Alibaba

If we are talking about Alibaba this topic, we have to know Yun ma who is Alibaba founder and the company’s spiritual leader. As far as I know that Yun ma are successful entrepreneur, philanthropist and scholar. He is a symbol of all Chinese entrepreneurs. Yun ma is a very smart person, we can find a lot about his celebrated dictum on the Internet such as “Most companies, when they’re doing well, they enjoy today’s wonderful life. They don’t worry about five years later—but I worry about five years later.” After this statement, we can conclude why he can be successful. He has good vision in his career, he understands what thing is he needs, and what thing is lacking. He was always able to complete his plans, and he has such capabilities obviously. I got another statement which is very interesting that “If EBay is a shark, and Taobao is crocodile, then crocodile and shark fight in the sea, we can get a clear conclusion. So we should attract shark go to the swamp.” I like his ambition, and I think this is a very clear strategy. No one can predict the future, let’s see what happens.

Reference:

http://projects.wsj.com/alibaba/

What is Alibaba?

Alibaba is China’s largest international Internet company, and it’s also a marketplace, a search engine and a bank, all in one. As far as I know, Alibaba has three main businesses which are Taobao, Alipay and Tmall. These three online shopping systems are most popular online shopping service which Chinese people more like to use. I often use them to buy some things such as Network Point Volume, Video game or EBook. These things are very cheap; I think they are cheaper than the same thing that I got from ebay or amazon. Taobao is Alibaba’s biggest shopping site, Tmall which is China’s leading B2C shopping site platform, and Alipay is a secure online payment system which likes PayPal. These three business help Alibaba became the most popular destination for online shopping, and it is also became one of the most valuable Chinese public companies. In the September 19, 2014, Alibaba successfully complete the listing, and at that time, this thing became the largest financial news in China.

Reference:

http://projects.wsj.com/alibaba/