Who is Alibaba? You may wonder. This is the company which has surpassed Amazon to be the world largest online retailer, whose headquarter, is neither in Beijing nor Shanghai, but a city called Hangzhou. 11-11 has gained a special meaning in Chinese because of the 4 "1"s: the day for celebrating for being a single. When a marketing team invented this promotion event to clear stocks on this day to push sales after the Chinese national day holiday, they did not expect this to be one of the craziest shopping day in China. Alibaba just achieved 35 billion RMB sales, that is nearly 6 billion US dollar sales in just one day. This does not include other retailers of all kinds, say automobile, jewelries and etc. The overall sales for this day for the online retail could be even more impressive.
Alibaba has its own payment system and does not generate profits by charging fees from sellers in their marketplace, but generate profits by charging for advertisement on their small seller marketplace called Taobao and regular fees for brands on T-mall. The business model depends largely on its significant online traffic. feeling threated by a popular online chat tool Wechat, they now push their online chat tool to compete with Wechat as Wechat starts to diverse some of the online shopping traffic from its Taobao and possibly T-mall platforms.Companies begin to use Wechat to direct sell products to Wechat users, which is about 0.3 billion by Jan 2013, a network of users who know each other personally and thus generating more credibility once products are recognized and recommended by a Wechat user.
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Here is an article on Bloomberg. Interested? Read it Alibaba Break Sales Record
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