Alibaba is
China’s largest e-commerce company, and by some measurements, it’s world’s
largest company. With its recent successful IPO in the United States, the
dominating IT company is facing a larger online commerce market in the world.
What’s Alibaba?
It contains three parts: Taobao: China’s
biggest shopping site; Tmall: specialise on online sales of branded goods and
focuses on China’s fast-growing middle class; Alibaba.com: connect Chinese
exporters with companies elsewhere in the world. Alibaba runs such a successful
business and it mainly depends on the rapid growth of Internet with over 600
million Internet users in China.
For Alibaba, it
provides free marketing by giving customers opportunities to easily share and
express their individualization experiences, they have Taobao and Tmall for
merchants to sell products and they pay Alibaba for advertisement to stand out
among all the competitors. For customers, it’s totally free with hundreds of
millions of choices while considering buying a single product.
It offers simple and
fun online configurators to gather preferences. For instance, when customers need
a bag, they can easily search the perfect product by identifying different colors,
sizes, utility, texture etc. Meanwhile, the sellers are able to collect customers’ preference to adjust their product and prices.
Alibaba has a unique
vendor rating system. After consumer gets their products, they can easily
evaluate the quality of the product and rate for the quality of service.
According to their impression, they usually rate stars on the store as well as
the product itself. Their ratings are very influential since it is an important
factor for other customers to decide on which product to buy. Customers are more likely to buy products from the stores with higher ratings and positive comments.
Alibaba has an effective paying system called Ali-pay; it
protects buyers from paying and gives confidence to small merchants to do
business. Ali-pay is a payment system that links to a person’s bank account. It
has an escort and the buyers don’t get money until the buyer is satisfied. The
merchants are responsible for getting their products delivered. Alibaba is
trying to work on the delivery service and build a better logistic network.
However, it’s now
facing a big challenge: mobile payment. As internet users are migrating to
smartphone and Alibaba is threatened by its rival Tencent, as Wechat—the mobile
messaging application—is spending billions of dollars to invest in online
payment.
It seems Alibaba is
in a dilemma, what’s the next step? Perhaps one of options is to cooperate with
its rival Tencent to develop an online operation system that covers both Internet
and smartphone users so that the two giant IT companies can share the online
commerce market together and gain much more profit than before.
Reference:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.