Alibaba opened the gate of e-commerce

Online shopping is growing faster than in any other country, and at its heart is Jack Ma's giant company

Alibaba is a curious phenomenon. The Chinese e-commerce market-maker has recently announced plans to list its shares on the US stock markets, through a massive initial public offering, making it the largest tech IPO ever. Following that, in terms of market capitalization, it would perhaps find its place between Facebook and Walmart, as some analysts predict.

Few people can give a neat summary of the company's sprawling organization and all its interests in various sideline businesses. What they can say is only that there are many of them.

Even fewer people know what kind of person the 49-year-old chairman, Jack Ma, is.

But do these things really matter? In many ways, Alibaba is no longer a company but a "platform" where lots of China's online businesses operate. It's like an open plaza for a sprawling online flea market ("$120 billion flea market", as the Financial Times called it) which accounts for more than half of China's parcel deliveries.

Those businesses generated a transaction volume of 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion; 18.73 billion euros) in 2012, more than the combined revenue of Amazon and eBay.

The key difference is that those businesses are not owned by Alibaba. The company offers the infrastructure and the service to facilitate their transactions, to make business easy, according to the company's mission statement.

Alibaba has two retail sites: Taobao, which features thousands of non-brand name products sold by smaller merchants; and Tmall, which offers brand-name products. All merchants are subject to a user-generated open rating system based on the quality of their goods and delivery. It also has a site for customers to manage payments and other financial needs, which is not included in the listing plan.

The two retail sites are where shoppers go to not only find goods that are not easily distributed in large batches or no longer available in large stores, but also to discover novelties.

The size of their business is not the most important thing - even though it is huge. Nor is the variety the two sites offer. What really makes Alibaba popular in China is its merchants rating system, in a country which still doesn't have a credit measurement standard for all the heavily indebted local governments or an open credit bureau whose data are shared by all financial services while remaining duly protected.

Alibaba's rating system has evolved completely outside the realm of government interference and despite occasional problems has been working much more effectively than the credit systems that the government bureaucracies are supposed to build.

Indeed, up to now, there is no other place that ordinary citizens have the equal right to inquire about a supplier's past delivery records and client satisfaction level, to compare them with others', and to post open complaints with the expectation of receiving prompt replies, apologies and re-deliveries. Inadvertently, it provides shoppers with not just a convenient way to do business, but also a sense of democracy and self-management on an everyday level.

The merchants rating system allows so many people to keep doing business on the retail sites in such an impressive daily volume in a country whose offline markets are at times inundated by fake goods and shoddy products. To be sure, there are fake goods on Alibaba and this needs to be addressed by perhaps an internal policing mechanism before such products are listed. But the problem is already less annoying than other parts of the economy - meaning that user-generated self-management already works better than lopsided government regulation.

China's Internet world and its online businesses are such a complex world that it offers people many different perspectives. Observers have pointed out that some of its largest investors are from overseas. Others have noted that e-commerce is redirecting more Chinese customers more quickly away from real-economy shops than in any other country.

One may also realize that, simply because of China's immense Internet population, for any large online business (not just Alibaba) to develop and sustain itself, it is important to create some new customer experiences. Part of the customer experience, as proven by Alibaba users, is customer empowerment and self-management.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact the writer at edzhang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 05/16/2014 page13)