Deborah Harris, Negosentro | Several prominent ecommerce players are active in the market today that operate in homogenous, complementary and parallel verticals but provide distinctive user experiences.
Two such major players are Alibaba and Amazon.
Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, the U.S.-based Amazon has four primary lines of business-consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators.
Founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and 17 other co-founders, Alibaba, based in China operates as the largest by volume in the global ecommerce marketplace.
Both Amazon and Alibaba have a long line of services and products. Besides the range of services and products, Amazon has also ventured into products like Alexa and Kindle, partner eCommerce business like Junglee.com, and even retail chains.
Alibaba has also diversified a lot- from digital payment services (Alipay) to cloud computing and financial services. Alibaba, however, is a much larger player on their home turf- China.
While Amazon accounted for 3% of the total retail volume in the US, the Alibaba group accounted for 11.18% of the total retail volume in China.
By operating in a “managed marketplace” closer to traditional retailing Amazon’s model provides the company with far greater control over the customer experience.
Taking a look at the traffic stats, Amazon.com has a higher traffic volume of 2.2B per month compared to Alibaba Group’s total traffic volume- 1.5B per month.
While Alibaba is making attempts to lead the market in the United States and Europe, Amazon is making efforts to expand its small presence in the lucrative Chinese e-commerce market.
It a challenge for both companies to execute their finely tuned business models in each other’s markets.
While Amazon needs billions of dollars and several years to build out its leadership in China, Alibaba will find it very difficult to compete with Amazon’s strong brand and logistics skills in the U.S. markets.
However, the battle is still on between these two Ecommerce players. All their products, services, growth rate, web traffic and even brand value needs to be considered to predict the potential winner.
This infographic compiled by Ecommerce-Platforms.com provides you with a clear view how Amazon and Alibaba compare with each other.
