The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

Insider Tips and Strategies for Sourcing Products from the World's Largest B2B Marketplace

Brad Schepp, Debra Schepp

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470573112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Exporte & Importe

The official guide to making a bundle buying and selling through Alibaba.com, the world's largest online B2B marketplace Alibaba.com is the world's leading global business-to-business online marketplace. People around the world use it every day to import and export products for big profits. But newcomers are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of products and the quantity of information available. The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide shows you how to ramp up your business or build an entirely new business, using the Alibaba.com brand and web site as your supplier. This practical guide provides simple answers for complex questions, from navigating the site, to finding products at the right price, to branding, and much more. Plus, the book includes best practices for importing, locating and vetting suppliers, and protecting yourself against online fraud. • An answer-packed guide for all your questions about doing business through Alibaba.com

• Officially licensed and supported by Alibaba.com, this is the only guide you need

• Includes inspirational profiles of people who have used Alibaba.com successfully to launch new businesses or revive old ones

• The first and only step-by-step guide to using Alibaba.com effectively Alibaba.com gives you the opportunity to make real money online. Here, you'll find a wealth of inside information that will help you use Alibaba.com safely and profitably.

 

PART I

Alibaba.com: The Opportunity

1

Alibaba.com Opens the Door to Global Trade

When you first arrive at Alibaba.com’s home page you may feel exactly like the original Ali Baba felt upon opening the door to his room of secret treasure. Nearly anything you can think to buy or sell is waiting for you on the site. You can explore more than 5.5 million storefronts offering manufactured products in 40 different categories from more than 240 countries and territories spanning the globe. As you explore Alibaba.com you will be joined by more than 42 million registered users. If you operate a small to medium-size enterprise (SME), you may find that Alibaba.com’s home page offers you treasure every bit as precious as the one our humble hero Ali Baba enjoyed.

Anyone who operates a SME will tell you that having a constant and reliable source of quality products is essential to building and sustaining a successful business. With the advent of the Internet, not only did an entirely new world of e-commerce open up to those who were eager to explore it, but now there are simply no boundaries tying any of us to one particular part of the globe. The Internet in general and e-commerce specifically have made the whole world our neighborhood and nearly every global citizen our prospective customer. Never before in history has such a wealth of opportunity been available, brought together in one single place on the Web.

Ali Baba may well have first found himself overwhelmed by his bounty. You may also look at the Alibaba.com home page, shown in Figure 1.1, and feel just a little dizzy over the possibilities. With so many choices available and so much potential opportunity, you will need some guidance as you learn your way around this vibrant and exciting new world. That’s where this book will help. Throughout the coming chapters you will find a wealth of information and advice to get you up to speed on everything you will need to know to use the Alibaba.com web site effectively, safely, and successfully. Dozens of experienced users have been overwhelmingly generous in sharing their experience, wisdom, and knowledge to help you follow in the steps they have taken to the successful lives they once only dreamed about. Dreaming is a very good place to start your journey.

Figure 1.1 Alibaba.com’s home page promises a wealth of trading opportunities.

First a Little History

When Ali Baba spoke his magic words, a door to a world of riches opened to reveal the treasure that was just waiting for a bright and ambitious young man to explore. When Jack Ma, a self-proclaimed dreamer and Alibaba.com’s founder, was planning and dreaming of his e-commerce business, this favorite childhood story came to his mind. As it happens, the tale of Ali Baba is quite popular among children in China. The story’s global appeal is clear to any youngster dreaming of standing in Ali Baba’s curly shoes. Jack Ma, however, is more than just a dreamer. He is also a man of action.

As a young man growing up in Hangzhou, China, Jack discovered he had an aptitude for learning the English language. At the age of 12, he was eager to build his English language skills and offered his services as a tour guide to foreign visitors. All throughout his teen years, he continued to build his English language skills, and after graduating from college, he became an English teacher. He also worked as a translator, and through this experience he made his first visit to the United States, during the mid-1990s. That’s when he saw the Internet for the first time, and suddenly a whole new world of potential opportunity opened up within his mind.

Jack quickly recognized the potential the Internet would have for helping people all over the world build rewarding lives by sharing information and trading goods. He went home determined to help bring the Internet to the people of China. Jack’s first e-commerce business was a sort of Yellow Pages directory called China Pages, believed to be China’s first commercial Internet site. Having had this experience, many people would have begun dreaming of riches, but that was not Jack Ma’s initial intention. “Being successful isn’t just about making money,” Jack said. “You have to create something. You create value for people. You help people, and then people help you. As a business, helping others is the result, not the process. Life is more fun than that.”

Instead, Jack took the American dream of successful business ownership back home and set about helping small to medium-size business owners make that dream come true in China. Jack saw the Internet and e-commerce as the perfect tools to help small and struggling manufacturers in his part of the world reach global customers. By doing that, they could prosper while creating jobs and lifting even more people out of poverty.

Today, of course, Alibaba.com is the most successful Internet company in China, and Jack is a very successful man by any measure. More than that, his dream of helping the struggling manufacturers he knew locally has spread across the globe. Now millions of Alibaba.com members are operating and expanding successful businesses, both manufacturing and sourcing products for sale in a global marketplace. You stand ready to become the newest dreamer to step onto the site and make your own dreams come true.

Some Alibaba.com Myths Debunked

Perhaps every company achieving near-meteoric success carries with it some myths that ultimately become more recognizable than the facts. Before going too much further, here is your opportunity to join the ranks of those who know both the myths and the facts that will lay those myths to rest.

♦ Alibaba.com is the Chinese eBay. Here is a misunderstanding that almost refuses to die. The only similarity between the U.S.-based online auction site eBay and Alibaba.com is that both companies operate on the Internet. eBay provides its members a way to buy and sell on the site. Alibaba.com, however, offers users a platform that gives them the opportunity to identify trading partners and create partnerships between manufacturers who need to sell their goods, and entrepreneurs who need to purchase goods for resale.

♦ Alibaba.com is only useful for finding manufacturers in China. Certainly you will find many Chinese manufacturers on the Alibaba.com platform. However, you are just as likely to find a reliable trading partner in Birmingham, Alabama, as you are to find one near Beijing. Remember that manufacturers from more than 240 countries and territories gather together on the site.

♦ Only large and experienced companies have the resources and knowledge necessary for sourcing internationally through Alibaba.com. There was certainly a time when the import/export business required expertise and experience most people simply did not possess. Today businesses of every size can easily find products to buy and customers to serve through Alibaba.com’s easy-to-use site. Most of the people interviewed for this book had never sourced (or even sold) products internationally before working with the trading partners they found through Alibaba.com. As a matter of fact, many of them had never even operated their own businesses before they brought their ideas to the site and set about fulfilling their dreams of developing their own businesses.

♦ You will need some knowledge of the Chinese language to effectively use Alibaba.com. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many manufacturers, no matter where they reside, have someone on staff who speaks English. Without English language skills, manufacturers limit the potential market for their products. Plus, with technological advancements, translation software available both on Alibaba.com and from sources outside the site goes a long way toward completely eliminating language barriers.

♦ Factories overseas have poor labor and environmental standards. This myth is a little piece of xenophobia that can be difficult to overcome. Many small business owners with whom we spoke had first tried sourcing their products in the United States. Some of them told us directly that upon visiting the factories here, they decided to look overseas, because they were not happy with the working conditions they found domestically. If you set your principles high for both labor and environmental standards, you will find companies that meet those standards and companies that fail to meet those standards in every corner of the globe.

♦ Alibaba.com is only useful if you want to sell through the Internet. The products sourced through Alibaba.com can be sold through many different channels. Although some business owners operate largely on the Internet, many others distribute their products through every wholesale and retail outlet you can imagine. It’s not unheard of for someone who has started out as an Internet retailer to eventually open a brick-and-mortar outlet, too.

Alibaba.com ’s Corporate Goals and Values

You may think that it’s not very important for people outside a company to know its corporate goals. Yet Alibaba.com’s goals permeate every part of its site and are reflected in every business decision it makes. As an Alibaba.com member, in a sense your fortunes are tied to the company’s; therefore, understanding its corporate goals can help you achieve your own.

Alibaba.com ’s history is a short one, because the company has only been operating for a mere 10 years. In 1999, Jack Ma gathered 17 friends and brought them together in his apartment to fashion and launch a company that is now part of a multibillion-dollar corporation. Over the course of the past decade, not only have all 18 original team members stayed together, but this successful corporation still owns that humble apartment where the story all began. Today the team still uses it for meetings and strategy sessions, returning to their early roots as they set about building the company and achieving the goals they set not so very long ago.

Three main corporate goals have driven Alibaba.com from the very start:

1. To make it easy to do business from any place on earth.

2. To be an essential partner to all businesspeople.

3. To build a company that lasts 102 years.

ALIBABA.COM’S SIX CORE VALUES

Now, we’re betting you’re especially curious about that last goal, involving lasting 102 years. Later in this chapter, Jack Ma himself explains what’s behind that. For now, let’s discuss the company’s core values.

With the three main corporate goals identified, Jack and his founding team established six core values to help them drive their new company. Some of these values may seem a little surprising to Western businesspeople, but they have served Alibaba.com and its customers well through the years, keeping the company focused on achieving the strategic goals with which the founders began their company. All Alibaba.com employees are coached in these core values when they join the company. In their semiannual performance reviews, how closely employees’ work and attitudes adhere to these core values is considered equally as important as the actual business goals set for them. Let’s take a look at each of them.

1. The customer comes first. Although businesses here in the United States often claim that “the customer is always right,” many of us who serve as the customer know that this is an ideal often not upheld, not even by a long shot. For Alibaba.com, this is the m...