August 17, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
You may be an online ecommerce store owner or perhaps an eBay seller, but if you are not in Asia you most likely have never heard of Alibaba.com. China’s leading ecommerce company operates this flagship site Alibaba.com which is a global marketplace for buyers and suppliers to connect. The site puts importers and exporters in touch to do commerce for a wide variety of products like toys, luggage, consumer electronics, and apparel. It also runs specialized sites which focus on Japan and China. This week, Alibaba.com announced that it would purchase a business management software division of Alisoft for $30.43 million dollars. It plans to buy the assets to help them improve an already extremely popular ecommerce marketplace.
Many of us in the United States may become more aware of Alibaba.com as this announcement comes shortly after an earlier released statement this month indicating Alibaba’s plans to spend $30 million on a U.S. marketing campaign for its international marketplace. There are also plans to triple the staff in the US. It also intends to spend a total of $200 and $300 on acquisitions through 2012. Yahoo happens to own a 44% stake in the Alibaba Group and therefor ha it in their best interest to grow the current 15% user base of Alibaba.com in the U.S. Despite net income dropping 15% last quarter the company is confident in their long term vision of their ecommerce marketplace. If you own an ecommerce store, you may want to check out the products on their site and see if there are any opportunities for you to connect with sellers who match your needs.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
