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 have the desire!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have so much desire to order from Alibaba, but I can't quite figure out how to verify that I won't be screwed. It seems almost guaranteed.

In other news...

[Nemyst]

In other news, 1.35 billion people (China) is more than 1.13 billion people (Europe and North America combined).

Should we really be surprised by this? China's simply catching up to the levels first world countries are at, and will most likely exceed them since they don't have the petty squabbles that Europe and the US have. That is, unless China's economy crashes.

What's the big deal

[Dyinobal]

What's the big deal about this? I doubt they are eating into amazon or Ebay's customers, all they are doing is expanding into the china and Asian markets where they have very little if any serious competition. I guess amazon could be jealous but I imagine expanding into china would be more hassle than it is worth.

Re:I have the desire!

[fragMasterFlash]

Most of the EBay sellers I buy from anymore ship directly from Asia. I doubt purchasing from Alibaba would be much different, so long as the seller accepted payment from well vetted processors such as Dwolla, Square, AmazonPayments or even those PayPal creeps.

Re:What's the big deal

[Sycraft-fu]

For some reason, there are people who think the US is DOOMED if China should overtake it in any way shape or form. They have this idea that there is #1, and there is third world shithole, with nothing in-between. So if the US loses its place of primacy, even in some things, then it is fucked.

I find this very funny going to Canada all the time which I doubt is #1 in anything, except for having the most Canadians. However it is an exceedingly nice country with a good standard of living, and so on. Turns out that there are lots of places that aren't #1 that are great places to live.

Also I always take anything coming out of China with a HUGE grain of salt since making up numbers and false economic make-work is the routine over there.

Regardless it doesn't matter. I don't shop at Amazon because they are "#1" I shop at Amazon because they are a good place to shop. Same reason I shop at Target. No, they aren't the #1 physical retailer, that would be Wal-mart in the US at least. I like Target better though. Turns out that not being #1 is working out ok for them.

Re:What's the big deal

[slippyblade]

And here's the clincher. The US isn't #1 in *anything* right now except military spending and wealth concentration.

Re:Outsell in junk, not in anything meaningful.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, unlike Japan, they have learned the lesson that you can make anything a little worse and a little cheaper -- and sell a lot more to the typical American or Chinese consumer. They do make some high quality stuff, but most of it is the save-now-swear-later crap that consumers want.