Alibaba Group

The project of a teacher who became an entrepreneur

Jack Ma Alibaba was founded by Chinese English teacher Jack Ma.

Together with 17 co-founders, in 1998 he launched the Alibaba Online portal, which became the largest online market.

Alibaba is the first Chinese Internet company to become globally recognizable.

They beat eBay and Amazon on their home turf, and they have a whole range of products and services that they intend to cover all segments of online business.

The basis of the business is the websites www.alibaba.com and www.alibaba.cn. It all started from there.

Alibaba site name

When one day Jack Ma was sitting in a cafe in San Francisco coming up with a name for his project, the name of the Alibaba hero known to the whole world came to mind. He called and asked the waitress if she had heard of Alibaba, to which she replied, "Of course, Alibaba and 40 bandits." Amazed, he ran out into the street and asked passers-by one by one if they knew about Alibaba, and he would get the same answer from everyone: "Of course, Alibaba and 40 bandits." At that moment he knew this was it, it would be called Alibaba, the whole world from Japan and China through Europe and America everyone knows about Alibaba.

Sesame open up!

That's how the name of the site came about.

Today, the group consists of sites that allow anyone anywhere in the world to easily buy and sell online. In addition to the office in China, there are branches in India, Korea, Japan, Great Britain and America, and the number of employees is over 24,000. The following websites operate within the Group:

Alibaba.com
Alibaba.cn or 1688.com
Aliexpress.com
Taobao.com
Tmall.com
eTao
Alipay
Juhuasuan.com
Aliyun
China Yahoo!

The e-economy is usually divided into three groups. These are B2B, i.e. business to business, B2C, business to consumer, as well as C2C, consumer to consumer.

Alibaba.com and Alibaba.cn are B2B, Aliexpress.com and Taobao.com are C2C, while Tmall is B2C.

Essentially, this means that the Alibaba sites are intended for bulk purchases, while the others are intended for physical persons.

Alibaba product catalog in Serbian or Alibaba product catalog in Croatian currently do not exist but if you select a country on the site pages, for example Serbia, the product prices will be displayed in dinars, and if you select Croatia, the prices will be displayed products in kuna, etc.

In addition, the Alibaba site can be searched with the help of an image. All you have to do is insert a picture of a product you found on the Internet and the site will find related products for you!

Aliexpress site has translations into languages, but they are only translations of the Aliexpress product catalog - and, then the main menu was translated and the product prices were expressed in the currency of the selected country.

It should be said that Aliexpress has favorable arrangements with large retail chains and airlines, so it is possible to buy even from China with free shipping, and often the cost of transportation is already included in the price of the product!

Alibaba and Aliexpress sites are covered in more detail in the Alibaba group menu texts.

Read how to buy from Alibaba, which are basic terms and expressions and should you buy from Alibaba

If you are interested in Aliexpress, read Aliexpress Basics and protection system and payment on Aliexpress, if you are interested in other Chinese online stores for bulk purchases( Gearbest, DX, DHGate...) see text cheap shopping on our blog.

Please Note

Sites that are in Chinese are more difficult for us to understand and you cannot buy directly from them, since the sellers do not know English and their products are intended exclusively for the Chinese market. This is very important since the prices on those sites are often much cheaper than on the sites that are intended for the whole world, and the Chinese versions of the sites are richer in both sellers and products!!!

Chinese Alibaba = 1688.com

Chinese Aliexpress = Taobao

Etao is a search engine but only for products that are sold online, like Google but only for certain sites.

Alipay is the third party in purchasing through these sites and is basically the Chinese Paypal. Thanks to him, online shopping in China is safe. Aliyun is a service platform for Cloud Computing.

Comparisons

(B2B)

Alibaba.com (36.7 million registered users, 2.8 million sellers)

Alibaba.cn (77.7 million registered users, 8.5 million sellers)

Alibaba's market share in 2012.

(C2C)

Aliexpress.com (3.6 million registered users, 50 million products)

Taobao.com (500 million registered users, 800 million products)

(B2C)

Tmall.com has no counterpart in English.

Market share in the first quarter of 2011.

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