We cannot deny the success of e-commerce websites and how these sites have helped businesses gain profits. Today, most businesses from small stores to established brands have moved to e-commerce stores or marketplaces.

The emergence of e-commerce websites has eliminated the need for investing in setting up large showrooms and engaging in local promotions. Now, you just need to define your project goal and invest in e-commerce platforms and start getting the customers to your e-store.

When it comes to giant players in the e-commerce sector, we cannot ignore ‘Alibaba’. It is one of the most successful e-commerce marketplaces and inspiration for start-ups who dream to grow big.

More About Alibaba
Alibaba is a large company having plenty of products in different categories. Their contribution to the e-commerce market in China is 80% and it has cemented its place worldwide.
Today, Alibaba has entered almost every sector from cloud services to payment systems and artificial intelligence.

What Makes an eCommerce Marketplace Like Alibaba Different From others?
This blog will help you know about Alibaba’s characteristics, structure, revenue models, etc that makes it different from the rest
1. Secure Transactions

Looking at the different concerns about the payments and transactions, Alibaba integrated several security mechanisms with the latest tech solutions to ensure secure transactions for sellers and buyers on Alibaba. Let us look at some of them

Feedback From Buyer
Alibaba integrated feedback & rating features into their platform to help buyers leave their feedback after shopping. This system helps the buyers build more trust in sellers having positive feedback and better ratings. Alibaba helps buyers to leave feedback within 60 days of purchase. The buyers can also raise disputes if they are not happy with their shopping.

Seller Verification
Each seller registered at the Alibaba portal is verified to ensure it is a genuine and registered firm. The verification process is handled by Alibaba itself. Buyers are allowed to request inspection service if they are not happy with the normal verification process.

Safe Escrow Payments Through Alipay
This payment system ensures safe transactions. It ensures that the sellers receive their money and buyers get the ordered products. The whole system is secure and helps both buyers and sellers to carry out safe transactions without disclosing debit/credit card or bank details.

Inspection Service
Here, Alibaba enables buyers to order services of a genuine 3rd party inspector. In this process, the person visits the company located in China the buyer wishes to cross-check and provide images as evidence for the products supplied by that manufacturer are good in terms of quality.

2. Exclusive Monetization Scheme
Well, Alibaba allows free registration for buyers and merchants. This helped Alibaba to have more registered sellers on their portal which in turn drive more buyers to their site.

The monetization plan adopted by Alibaba primarily focuses on advertising, marketing, and tech support offered along with the membership programs. Types of supplier membership programs provided by Alibaba are
Free supplier membership
Gold Supplier Membership

3. Doesn’t Allow Search Engines To Search For Products
When it comes to search engines like Google, they let the products from Amazon or eBay be displayed in the response list. On the other hand, Chinese search engines do not allow to display of links to e-commerce sites like Alibaba, Taobao, etc. It means to search for items from Alibaba, a buyer needs to visit the Alibaba app or website and look for the product they want. This prevents buyers from viewing items from the competitor portal.
This monetization plan helped Alibaba generate revenue just like Google does.

4. Distinct Alipay Payment Mechanism
Alipay helped initiate escrow on the Alibaba website. The Alipay-based escrow feature helped Alibaba to integrate a robust payment mechanism on the platform.

5. New transaction patterns
When the entire world had different marketplace models to follow like B2C, B2B, and C2C, Alibaba came up with a new transaction model that offers customer satisfaction and boosts sales. The new model is the C2B model - consumer-to-business. The C2b model eliminates the supply chain costs and reduces the product turnover time. Now, Alibaba is also working on building yet another payment mechanism that is Online-to-Offline (O2O). The idea behind this mechanism is to merge offline and online sales to offer an extraordinary shopping experience to the customers.

Features To Be Considered To Create An eCommerce App Like Alibaba

You need to build 2 apps/panels for online eCommerce marketplace app development and integrate features accordingly. These 2 panels are for
Sellers
Buyers

Features To Be Included In Sellers Panel
Product listings
Product management
Vendor registration & profiles
Company registration & verification
Messaging
Subscription model
Reports
Order management

Features To Be Included In Buyers Panel
Customer registration & profiles
Product purchasing
User authentication & account page
Messaging
Payments
Wishlist
Shipping
Notifications
Ratings & Reviews
Customer support
Disputes

Scalable Monetization Strategies Adopted By Alibaba To Attain Success
Subscriptions
Storefront fees
Value-added services
Online marketing services

What Would Be The eCommerce App Development Cost For An App Like Alibaba?
Well, to know the approximate ecommerce app development cost, we need to assess different factors like
Working hours to finish the project
Features & functionalities for your app
Platforms integrated
Tech-stack used and many other factors

Well, before you dive into eCommerce mobile app development to build an app like Alibaba, it is necessary to hire an expert mobile app development company to get a robust app.

Only professional e-commerce app development services would help you get the right solution to build an e-commerce marketplace like Alibaba. Certainly, it is a considerable investment that needs informed decisions and appropriate assistance from experts in eCommerce mobile app development. If you are looking for professional help from tech professionals, The Q Dev can help you build an efficient marketplace with vast experience and expertise in mobile app development. Connect with us to discover an incredible e-commerce marketplace.

Summing up
Alibaba is a lengthy process as far as technologies and functionality are concerned. So, make sure you seek the right guidance and help from an app development company having enough experience in building e-commerce apps like Alibaba.

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ecommerce mobile app development

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