In September 1999, 18 founders led by Jack Ma formally established Alibaba Group in an apartment in Hangzhou. The group’s first website was the English global wholesale trade market “Alibaba International Station (www.alibaba.com)”. After nearly 20 years of development, Alibaba International Station has become the world’s number one cross-border B2B e-commerce platform with extensive influence around the world. According to statistics, this platform has been able to influence about 2% of China’s exports and serve buyers from more than 200 countries and regions around the world, with a total of more than 50 million people.
The core value of Alibaba’s business lies in:
(1) Buyers can search for company and product information posted by sellers;
(2) Sellers can search for buyers’ purchasing information;
(3) It provides communication tools and account management tools for buyers and sellers.
In the future, the development trends of Alibaba International Station include the following points.
First, transform from an information platform to a trading platform. In the past, most of Alibaba International Station’s B2B business was to provide business opportunities to both importers and exporters and to facilitate negotiations between the two parties. However, the subsequent transactions and export links were mainly conducted offline or through other means by both importers and exporters. At present, Alibaba is striving to achieve efficient matching between importers and exporters, and to provide supporting services for the subsequent links, that is, to enable both importers and exporters to complete a series of processes such as payment, transportation, insurance, customs, and tax refund with the help of the International Station.
Second, to achieve credit and security. The difficulty of cross-border B2B transactions lies first in the mutual distrust between importers and exporters for large-scale trade. If credit guarantee can be solved, then online transactions and prepayment will become feasible. To this end, Alibaba has launched a “credit guarantee system”, which is to give a certain credit guarantee amount based on the basic information, trade transaction volume and other information of the enterprise on the International Station, and improve the security of their provision of payment to the importer (if the exporter does not ship the goods after the importer pays, Alibaba will compensate the importer first).
Third, to build a cross-border e-commerce ecosystem. Alibaba International Station will not only be a trade information platform, but will gradually move towards a trading system and ecosystem. All kinds of services related to B2B cross-border trade will be integrated under the drive of data and credit. Online trade, logistics, payment, customs clearance and other links can be realized on Alibaba International Station.
Fourth, realize online small transactions. In order to cope with the fragmentation trend of B2B orders, Alibaba International Station has developed and improved the online small wholesale function since the second half of 2015, so that some small orders can be placed directly on the platform, and realize online payment by credit card, third-party payment tools and wire transfer.