Trading giant Alibaba has finally decided to join the second-generation of B2B e-commerce sites with the release of AliExpress.
Alibaba, now celebrating the 10th anniversary of its foundation, is the proud leader of the first generation of B2B marketplaces which offered directory services for sellers and buyers. A kind of yellow pages for international trade with value-added services like trading information resources.
Quickly the industry expanded and appeared many competitors trying to get their portion of the cake. TradeKey, Made-in-China, EC21 are just some of the most recognizable websites but they can be counted by hundreds.
During the last few years there has been lot of gossiping about Alibaba stepping into the e-commerce field… it’s only taken them 5 years after Chinavasion and DHgate inaugurated this new vertical.
There hasn’t been that much buzz about AliExpress yet, and only a few days ago Alibaba decided to promote it openly on their main homepage. So far no official press release and only a couple of posts on the Alibaba Forums and emails to some of their members.
AliExpress is currently hosted as a subdomain on the main Alibaba website, although it is very likely that aliexpress.com will be used in the future, once the Beta stage has been passed.
