Alibaba.com, the treasure of global e-commerce

You might have heard about Alibaba.com; perhaps you’ve come across the name when looking to buy something online, or you’ve heard about it on the news. Today, Alibaba is one of the largest e-commerce and cloud technology businesses in the world, with over 1.3 billion annual active consumers across its global ecosystem (Alibaba Group Annual Report 2023). 

Imagine Amazon mixed with eBay, throw in some PayPal and Google, then sprinkle it with social media. It’s a social marketplace, bank, search engine, and more. Alibaba’s strength comes from its ability to integrate e-commerce, digital payments, cloud computing, and Ai in e-commerce insights. 

For the financial year ending March 2023, Alibaba reported annual revenue of over RMB868 billion (approximately AU$190 billion) (Alibaba Group Annual Report 2023). This shows how combining strong business acumen with advanced data analytics and Ai e-commerce business strategy can transform a company’s impact on a global scale.  

How did Alibaba take over the e-commerce game? 

Alibaba’s strength lies in the unification of branding, searching, sharing, and selling. It has two huge online retail platforms, Taobao and TMall; a payment service, Alipay; a search engine, Shenma; and video and social media channels, Youku and Weibo. It also offers cloud storage. 

Tapping into the power of creating a bond between sellers and consumers through communication, Alibaba connects them without selling items themselves. Like eBay, it’s a B2B (business-to-business) platform. It doesn’t cost anything to sell through them, but you can buy advertising. 

AliPay has become popular in China, partly because of its secure payments and protection for buyers if the merchants don’t deliver the goods – it also offers micro-lending. 

Leveraging advanced analytics and Ai in e-commerce, Alibaba tracks users through a unified account across its ecosystem, collecting data on age, gender, location, education, and spending behaviours. This insight allows highly personalised marketing and seamless user experiences across its apps and websites. 

Tracking users through analytics 

The big benefit for Alibaba itself is that it can observe and track its users through a unified account for all their services. It can learn about users’ age, gender, location, demographic, education, and even spending habits and power, through its apps and websites. 

It’s not surprising that Alibaba is now extending its selling power to western merchants. With international e-commerce continuing to rise rapidly, Alibaba is making it easier for the Chinese, and especially those in rural areas, where the middle class is expanding, to buy things that might not be readily available locally. 

Of course, western e-commerce companies remain keen to compete; Amazon and others are continually exploring strategies, and allegedly Amazon is investigating ways to cut shipping costs to compete. 

For Australian retailers, it’s more likely that they will develop strategies to leverage Alibaba’s expanding presence in the region, including its establishment of offices in key markets such as Australia, to reach Chinese customers, as there are no Australian B2B platforms big enough to compete with it. 

Alibaba’s success also highlights the vital role of advanced business analytics and intelligent strategy alongside Ai in e-commerce. Understanding how global e-commerce giants collect, interpret, and activate massive data sets is exactly the edge today’s leaders need. 

If you’re fascinated by how data, Ai and strategy drive online commerce, explore how the Master of Business Analytics and AI Strategy or our Graduate Certificates in Business Analytics or Data Science can prepare you to lead in this space. 

Learn more about the future of Ai in e-commerce and gain the data and analytics skills that top organisations like Alibaba prize – all while studying 100% online. Ready to shape the future of global e-commerce? Build your edge with RMIT Online’s Master of Business Analytics and AI Strategy.  

Want to break into data-driven decision making? Start with the Graduate Certificate in Business Analytics. 

Curious about the tech behind the trends? Get hands-on experience with data and coding through the Graduate Certificate in Data Science.