A few weeks ago we wrote about 5 Things Western Brands Need to Know When Entering the Chinese Market. One of the points from that post was that Alibaba dominates that market. Not surprisingly, people wanted to know more about that. Two questions we say come from that post were: what or who exactly is Alibaba and how dominant are they? Here's the answer...

Alibaba looks a lot like the Chinese version of Amazon. They both have dedicated B2B and B2C marketplaces as well as a diversified portfolio of cloud and entertainment services. Despite the business similarities, Amazon and Alibaba are different in one very clear way. Alibaba is much larger and much more dominant than Amazon. In fact, Alibaba holds about 80% of the Chinese e-commerce market while Amazon on their best day, Cyber Monday, only had 36%. To put that a different way, Alibaba does more than Amazon and eBay combined. That doesn't mean Amazon isn't a force to be reckoned with, they are, but US brands have a much better opportunity to compete than their Asian counterparts.