Slashdot Mirror
China's Alibaba To Outsell Amazon, eBay Combined
hackingbear writes "China's largest e-commerce firm, Alibaba Group, expects to sell merchandise this year worth more than that sold by Amazon Inc and eBay combined. The company is aiming for 3 trillion yuan ($473 billion) in annual transaction value from its Taobao e-commerce units in the next 5 to 7 years, rising from the 1 trillion yuan of sales expected for 2012. 'From their annual reports we did a rough calculation and we were similar last year but we are growing faster than them this year, so this year we are probably larger than them,' Zeng Ming, Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba, said of Amazon and eBay."
I recently figured this out. There is another site Ali Express which caters to individual buyers. All prices are listed along with delivery costs. It seems to have a nice filter / search function. ,
Also if you are concerned about the equipment arriving and not working, there is buyer protection, where they will hold your money until you are satisfied withe purchase. I didn't have to use this so it may be difficult to get the refund, all I can say is I was satisfied with the service I got and I would use it again.
(Note; I am not affiliated in any way with Alibaba or Aliexpress)
You aren't looking in the right place. Alibaba is merely the parent company. They own taobao.com who owns tmall.com The latter two are the two main places to go for cheap EVERYTHING and a lot of consumers in China know this too.
The US is #1 among all countries in overall GDP, overall manufacturing, aerospace, information technology, music, movies, TV, video games, automotive last I checked (GM, Ford, Chrysler combined), most heavy machinery (eg. CATerpillar) and many, many others.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The article is about Taobao, which is the consumer subsidiary of Alibaba.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
You can message and even chat with the sellers. I bought xbox 360 controller parts for 6 dollars shipped. It took over a month to get here, but it was cheap.