What Makes Alibaba Become Successful?
“Alibaba Group” is a Chinese company similar to EBay and Amazon, which was founded by Jack Ma in 1999. This company had a significant success in 2012, which was two of Alibaba’s portals handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales more than the total sum in sales of EBay and Amazon.
Nowadays, Alibaba has become one of the most successful company in the world as well as the founder Jack Ma became the richest person in China. The company wants to raise as much as $21.1 billion in its initial public offering and be the largest sale of new stock in U.S’s history, and eventually the “shares in the company made their debut in the US at $92.70”, stated by BNN and BBC News. The successful reasons behind this company can be generally evaluated through three aspects as opportunity, customer segmentation and value propositions of the company.
Alibaba is founded in a country where the customer base is about 1.4 billion people, as a result, the company can easily recruit more customers.
Once you have any experience in browsing the website of Alibaba, you can notice that this is a simple, clear and easy to read site even though it has more than 200 categories of products. The customer segmentation of the company is virtually for any customers, from individuals to wholesale buying. All different customers with different needs can be guided to what they look for in less than a minute.
Furthermore, the company is dedicated to providing the best customer services to their customers that is well known in China. Jack Ma keeps emphasizing that his customers deserve the best services. We can see that these are the core values of the company and what makes Alibaba become a global leader in e-commerce business.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29282407
http://www.bnn.ca/News/2014/9/5/Alibaba-seeks-21B-in-record-breaking-US- offering.aspx
Images: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/09/19/business/dbpix-alibaba-jackma5alt/dbpix-alibaba-jackma5alt-blog480.jpg
http://www.courtneydayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/mlm-success.jpg
http://www.12manage.com/images/picture_market_segmentation.jpg
http://www.maximumcallcenter.com/images/customer-service.jpg
In regards to your acquisitions about customer service, there is a common misconception with the purchase systems on Alibaba, they’re not traditional and lead to a lot of complaints by initial users. I wrote a blog article deriving from this one on the matter ( https://blogs.ubc.ca/cpowroznik/2014/11/03/the-consumer-struggle-with-checkout-on-alibaba/ ). BTW great post, I really enjoyed it!
Dear Christopher,
Thanks for your response to my blog, it is my pleasure to share my thoughts and ideas with you.
Sincerely,
Teddy