Alibaba Essay

606 Words3 Pages
Alibaba International (www.alibaba.com), short in Alibaba, is a B2B e-commerce mediating service enabler that focuses on cross-border trade. Alibaba is designed to provide a global electronic marketplace (GEM) between thousands of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) of China and overseas trading partners to work together for international trade. Alibaba’s aims are: • to increase the volume of international trade and lowering the cost of transactions. • to make SMEs easier to find customers and products and enable them to work together online. • to become an alternative GEM for existing international trade. To implement Alibaba successfully, however, requires that technical infrastructure be able to provide a seamless interaction integration of thousands of SMEs and a trustful international trade environment involving a network of global firms. Would Alibaba platform be able to integrate the complex business interactions between both Chinese and overseas SMEs involved in specific multilingual backgrounds, product descriptions, document processing, credit levels and payment schemes? How would Alibaba handle trust and payment problems to make Alibaba to be acceptable to millions of SMEs? This paper attempts to analyze Alibaba as a GEM case based on the materials disclosed on www.alibaba.com and to obtain some experiences and lessons for the future GEM design. The remainder of this paper focuses on the technical functions of Alibaba and is arranged as follows. Section 2 defines global electronic marketplaces and lists its main functions. Section 3, discusses Alibaba as an evolving GEM platform to show its successful experiences. Section 4 outlines the technical architecture of Alibaba. Section 5 discusses the maturity of Alibaba GEM platform by comparing the ideal GEM functions. Section 6 provides a suggested solution to Alibaba for improving its future

More about Alibaba Essay

Open Document