Mavista Blog

Alibaba is one of the biggest online business trade and retail platform site for small and medium-sized enterprises. There are two Alibaba sites aiming for different users. Alibaba.cn is a trading platform for traders within China, while Alibaba.com is an English language site specialized for international buyers looking for trades with China and other Asian manufacturing countries. The two sites operates independently , which means if a seller in China wants to promote his products to both International and China buyers, he/she have to register one account at each site and manage them separately (This review will be focusing on Alibaba.com) .

Users will be offered a “Website” for users to show their company information and promote their products. You could list the information of your product or services on your website. Premium users can create a customized layout for the site to attract visitors. Put in mind that a product will take up to a day to approve before it is going to be listed.

The batch upload function is a user-friendly function for sellers to upload multiple products at a time using the Excel from provided by Alibaba.com. All you have to do is select the product category, fill in and upload the batch upload from and product photos.

Other than searching for product keywords directly, you could also look up for buyers or sellers through the buying/ selling leads. The lead is an ad-posting function for users to search for their targeted services, or make a trading request.

You can pay for a premium account to add additional features to your account and raise your ranking on the search list. There are currently two kinds of premium memberships: Gold Suppliers and Trust Pass. Gold suppliers are premium memberships for traders of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, where Trust Pass is for other countries over the world. Gold Suppliers enjoy more user functions and a higher priority in the search engines, of course in return the membership fee is higher.

It was recently announced that Alibaba will discontinue Trust Pass membership starting from July to avoid discrimination between local and international users. Current Trust Pass memberships will be offered a free upgrade to Gold Suppliers membership for a year. So it might not be a bad idea for international traders to get an Trust Pass now for a free upgrade before the deadline!

Alibaba.com is a site with numerous traders and business opportunities. However, there are black sheep in every flock. Beware of scammers! Avoid trading with suspicious traders even if they are premium members. Here’s a forum post with some tips of how to avoid scammers. The official website provies a good community for discussions in different issues. Feel free to visit there and ask any questions before you make any decisions.