Alibaba Doesn’t View Amazon As The Competition

According to Alibaba CTO Jeff Zhang, the company does not view Amazon as a competitor, or at least declines to describe them as such when asked directly, instead noting that Alibaba is more of a middle man between sellers and buyers, whereas Amazon is … not. What Amazon is, or what Amazon is doing in China, is something Zhang said he is “not terribly clear on.”

The issue came up when Zhang was in Seattle touting the benefits of Alibaba’s ability to synthesize data from its consumer eCommerce and payment sites, and turn that data into insights that give them a competitive edge.

Just not over Amazon, with whom they are definitely not competing.

And they are certainly not doing it in Amazon’s backyard by opening its first U.S. office in Seattle two years ago.

And it does seem odd that Alibaba described its marketplace business as essentially different from Amazon’s, since by most accounts Amazon runs an eCommerce marketplace in China that is quite popular. According to recent figures, 62 percent of Chinese retailers sell goods on Amazon.

As for their analytics – Alibaba is touting something unique, and not so unique. The not-so-unique is the reliance on data analytics pulled from their customer transaction data – so many retailers do that at this point it is basically expected. Alibaba does — by nature of its massive size and scale in eCommerce, payments and microblogging — have a massive trove of data to draw on, and that is unique.

And with that much data on hand about so much retail activity, most experts note it would be well within Alibaba’s skill set to develop a better end-to-end shopping experience for its customers and overall grow the site’s visibility and desirability outside of China proper. But then, Alibaba has been plagued with counterfeiting issues as it tries to get international credibility – and perhaps all that sophisticated machine learning could help them tackle that issue.