Alibaba’s dominant business model is an exchange. Piccoli, in his textbook, defines exchanges as “Exchanges are organizations that create a marketplace for buyers and sellers to come together and transact. Thus, an exchange does not take control of inventory or worry about fulfillment. Rather the exchange provides a “market making” service and is compensated with fees, commission on sales, or consulting fees on more complex business-to-business transactions. The prototypical example of an exchange is eBay. Others include Alibaba.com and Ariba—both mainly targeting the business-to-business domain.” (Piccoli, pg 170)
Principally, Alibaba is a Chinese business to business e-commerce company. Alibaba focuses on suppliers and buyers trading both domestically and internationally. The business to business marketplaces provide a platform to facilitate e-commerce between business sellers, whom Alibaba refers to as “suppliers”, and wholesale buyers. Suppliers and buyers would use the marketplaces to establish their presence online, identify potential trading partners and conduct business with each other. Suppliers and some buyers would use the marketplaces to host their company profiles and catalogs in standardized formats known as “storefronts” and post “listings” such as products, services and trade leads. Users could view storefronts and listings in over 30 industry categories and nearly 5,000 product categories by either searching for keywords or browse through the
The collection of private, commercially oriented organizations, ranging in size from sole proprietorships to large corporations is referred to as
In 2005, young entrepreneurs, Robert Kalin, Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell created a company that would give the makers of the world an online platform to sell their goods in Brooklyn, New York. The companies mission was to be the middleman between artists, crafters of handmade items or collectors of vintage products and their worldwide customers. Products sold on Etsy cover a wide range of categories, from art, clothing and jewelry to decorative objects and arts and crafts supplies. The company is effectively engaging in C2C (customer to customer) or P2P (peer to peer) e-commerce, where both the seller and buyer are private persons, as opposed to other forms of Internet commerce, such as B2C (business to customer) or B2B
Nowadays, high-speed development of the technology has changed the daily life and the computer and the Internet have become the mainstream in China markets. The expansion of the Internet rapidly leads the e-commence to develop and change the operation way of Chinese business. At present, there are many people who want to start-up a business on their own. Ma seizes the opportunity to establish a great stage ‘Alibaba’ for
Business-to-Business ecommerce refers to electronic processing of transactions such as products/services or information between businesses (Shaw, 2015). It includes electronic data interchange and supply chain management. It also influences the buying decision of customers in that when customers decide on a purchase, they start by checking it
Read the case carefully and answer the following questions: 1.Till 2005, eBay EachNet was the leader in the Chinese e-commerce market, controlling more than half of it. But eBay EachNet soon lost its market leadership position to Taobao.com (Taobao). In this context, analyze the reasons that can be attributed to Taobao’s edge over eBay. 2.a. To enable people to trade with each other, Pierre Omidyar created a marketplace in September 1995 which was later called eBay. By mid 1997, eBay received one million page hits per
Alibaba Group is one of the world’s most successful Chinese multinational corporations originally based in China. It is an e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business services through web portals for both international and domestic China trade. Alibaba launched various sites including Alibaba.com which was the first China’s commercial website launched in 1999. The purpose of Alibaba.com site is not just to connect Chinese supplier
How would you describe VTB’s business model (the product and services it sells, target market’s to whom it sells them, the value proposition it offers, and its financial model)?
The Alibaba group has thrived in the Chinese e-commerce sector from its inception in 1998. They currently account for over 70% of online shopping in China and delivered annual revenues of $636 million in the 12month period ending June 2009 (case p1-2). Alibaba’s successes are due to multiple factors that have allowed them to create corporate advantage, and thus establish market leadership in China (Case p1). The configuration and coordination of Alibaba’s
The reason behind Alibaba’s success is its ability to tap into markets that its competitors struggle with by providing special services that target strategic needs of the Chinese population and its potential trading partners. Alibaba’s services are specifically catered to small to medium sized businesses(Liquori, 2009), by being an easily accessible advertising platform that is also cheap to set up. These small businesses can be discovered by other companies who search Alibaba for specific products rather than by brands. Furthermore, the escrow services offered by Alibaba in which its competitors are unable to provide, differentiates itself from the rest in
One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name. And then a waitress came, and I said, "Do you know about Alibaba?" And she said yes. I said, "What do you know about ?", and she said, "Open Sesame". And I said, "Yes, this is the name!" Then I went onto the street and found 30 people and asked them, "Do you know Alibaba?" People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China … they all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba – open sesame. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So … easy to spell, and globally known. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We also registered the name "Alimama", in case someone
Alibaba Group operates a wide range of Internet services, including B2B international trade, online retail and payment platforms and data-centric cloud computing services, is committed to create a convenient online trading channels all people around the
Online shopping or online retailing is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. Alternative names are: e-shop, e-store, Internet shop, web-shop, web-store, online store, and virtual store. An online shop evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or shopping center. The process is called business-to-consumer (B2C) online shopping. In the case where a business buys from another business, the process is called business-to-business (B2B) online shopping. The largest of these online retailing corporations are eBay and Amazon.com, both based in the United States.
Alibaba is the largest leading e-commerce companies of B2B online retailer in China and it is giving a trading platform that associates worldwide purchasers to huge number of small medium enterprises to conduct business in their network. The market operate by Alibaba
Business to Consumer e-Commerce, also referred to as B2C, is the process of selling goods and services over the Internet rather than having a traditional brick and mortar outlet to sell such products. Businesses establish a website or electronic marketplace with multimedia catalogs, interactive order processing, protected electronic payment systems, while also offering online customer support which allow consumers to shop and purchase items in confidence (Retrieved from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-business-to-consumer-e-commerce.htm).
Alibaba Group is the world's outstanding business-to-business e-commerce service company, which provides an efficient online trading platform for buyers and suppliers all over the world. It is China's largest e-commerce group which was founded by Jack Ma in 1999, and has developed into seven affiliated groups, namely Alibaba International Business Operations, Alibaba Small Business Operations, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, Juhuasuan, e-Tao and Alibaba Cloud Computing (News, 2012). Besides, Alibaba Group has more than 24,000 employees in 70 cities which scattered in China, India, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States (News, 2012).