Question

Given that Alibaba does not own or distribute any of the merchandise exchanged on its sites, describe what factors had to develop for the company to succeed.

Answer 1

Alibaba was initially founded in 1999 in Jack Ma's Hangzhou apartment, before the launch of Alibaba.com later the same year. Taobao.com was introduced as an online platform in 2003 when the number of Internet users in China reached 80million. Shortly afterward, both Alipay and Aliwangwang (instant messenger on Taobao) were launched to complete the Taobao procurement process. The number of Internet users in China grew to 210 million in 2007, and Alimama was introduced as a transaction site for advertising. That same year, Taobao commenced to monetize.

The business model, profit model and credit model are the three main factors that affect Alibaba. Therefore, there are four subsidiary factors namely considerate operation, market chance responsive, new transaction trends and completed program helping Alibaba to achieve success.

Alibaba's quality of service focuses on small businesses. Whether we're thinking about 1688 a B2B eCommerce platform explicitly targeted at wholesale and procurement company Taobao a B2C & C2C eCommerce platform that brings together numbers of individual sellers or YiDaTong (the largest Chinese qualified import and export agent) that not only subsidizes small businesses but also helps them accumulate credit through historical data, all three of Alibaba 's core buyouts.

The Alibaba site currently serves more than 0.5bn registered users with more than 0.23bn active buyers and more than 8 m active sellers. The Annual Orders reach 11bn already. Alibaba will make use of marketing, keyword bidding and customer data for benefit, due to the vast number of customers on the platform. Taobao ads can produce thousands of clicks for a single brand; keyword bidding leads to higher brand ranking in search results; technical services help sellers manage their online store and consumer relationships by analyzing customer expectations and feedback.