Alibaba group is one of largest ecommerce giant in the world, Alibaba.com is the online business-to-business (B2B) trading platform for small businesses.

Many people outside China think Alibaba.com is the answer to all their sourcing needs from China, they can easily to find the products and factories.

However, I’m here to tell you something you may not know before about the suppliers and products on Alibaba.com.

What is golden members?

Every factory, retailers, wholesalers or trade company can become a golden member easily if they pay CNY29,800.00 annually, which is about USD4000/year, someone think golden members are reliable, but it seems almost the Alibaba Chinese supplier are golden members.

How are the products ranking at Alibaba.com?

Many people think the higher ranking at Alibaba.com is something like google ranking, actually, it’s not true, the higher ranking means more money, the members need to update their membership package, the price is 10K U.S. Dollars to 100K dollars.

Many factories are not at Alibaba.com.

There are some amazing factories and suppliers on Alibaba.com, but more factories don’t want to join Alibaba, why’s that?

1. Alibaba charge high member fees, they always ask you update to higher package, which is something like auction, the supplier maybe need to pay over USD10,000 per year to get better ranking.
2. If the factory wants to sell the products on alibabal.com, they need to hire someone who can speak English, the salary may be over USD7000/year for each salesman.
3. Huge numbers of the inquiries that come from Alibaba are nuisance inquiries. 95%. inquiries from Alibaba will not actually lead to sale, many peoples send the inquiry maybe only want to know the price or just shopping around.
4. Many factories go to exhibition to show the products directly to the customers, we know many real factories even don’t have a website and they don’t’ consider Alibaba is good source to get real customers.

There are many trade company on Alibaba.com, they pay CNY29800 per year and list thousands of products, actually, their prices are not competitive, most of them can purchase from 1688.com, I will discuss the site Alibaba.com and 1688.com in next article.