Another Game in Town Alibaba Enters the U S Market, Episode 2

Alibaba is aggressively pursuing business in the U.S. market, with services designed to help B2B sellers drive sales to domestic and global customers on their e-commerce platform. In this podcast, John Caplan, President of North America B2B and Globalization for the Alibaba Group, explains Alibaba's offering, platform capabilities, fees, and potential contribution to a distributors' e-commerce, omnichannel, and growth objectives. Alibaba's offering is fundamentally different than Amazon Business, which may be the most significant benefit of all for distribution. When it comes to virtual marketplaces, distributors now have a choice. As the COVID-19 crisis locks in customer preferences for online buying, every distributor should take notice.

Featuring: Mark Dancer, Author of NAW’s Innovate to Dominate: The 12th Edition in the Facing the Forces of Change Series; Richard Blatcher, Director of Industry Marketing and Business Intelligence at PROS; and John Caplan, President of North America B2B and Globalization for the Alibaba Group.

Key Points:
Alibaba offers a different way of doing business. Sellers own the customer relationship, pay a membership fee (no commission on sales) and can use tools to help business collaborate with their customers. Distributors need to understand the difference. Given the COVID-19 crisis, a fresh look is probably required, especially if a distributor’s plans include multiple online routes to market (otherwise known as omnichannel).

John Kaplan is an accomplished business leader and entrepreneur in US and global markets. He brings perspectives that distributors will relate to as they evaluate Alibaba, a business that is not familiar.

Owning the customer has many implications. One is that Alibaba is perfectly happy functioning as a way for distributors to find new customers and convert them to the distributor’s own e-commerce or human sales channels.

Alibaba’s platform enabled custom and negotiated pricing by customer. They offer CRM tools. This opens the opportunity for distributors to work with customers to overcome the COVID-19 crisis in a collaborative way, making changes according to each customer’s needs as they evolve over time.

Alibaba can enable global sales for distributors, but also offering a new online platform for businesses to buy from other business within the United States. In this way, Alibaba is a player if supply chains are restructured to shift supply chains to sourcing closer to home.

In this Episode:
[01:49] – About Alibaba
[04:20] – About the B2B market
[05:55] – Understanding your business, market, and customers
[11:02] – Building trust in a virtual world
[14:44] – How to do business on the Alibaba.com platform
[17:10] – Engaging with customers as part of your transformation journey
[20:40] – Data, AI, and analytics
[27:41] – The omnichannel experience
[30:50] – Why the next 10 years will only be harder
[32:33] – eCommerce: How to convert well
[38:45] – Where to refocus your efforts

Full Transcript:
Richard Blatcher: Welcome everybody. I’m proud to be here in Washington, DC at the NAW Executive Summit. And, I’m really delighted to be here with Mark Dancer, an NAW Institute Fellow, and John Caplan of the Alibaba Group. So welcome to both of you. This interview is an episode in our ongoing podcast series, which looks at Innovate to Dominate: The 12th Edition in the Facing the Forces of Change Book Series, which Mark has authored. And, we’re very proud at PROS to sponsor this new initiative. So, John, maybe you could introduce yourself and tell the folks a little bit more about your role and about Alibaba.

John Caplan [1:49]: Sure. So, it's great to be here and thank you for welcoming me. I'm John Caplan, from alibaba.com. alibaba.com is the original business of Alibaba group. So Alibaba group, uh, has multiple business lines, but the alibaba.com business is the, uh, is the team that I'm on. And what we are is a global platform to help businesses do business with one another. We're really the world's largest B2B marketplace, but unlike, uh, I think how people generally think of marketplaces, our business is, is aligned to the interests of sellers, distributors, manufacturers globally. Um, so we, uh, provide the ability for someone who wants to sell their goods to customers, uh, to own the customer relationship big, a significant, uh, part of our platform to pay a membership fee. So we don't charge a commission on people's sales. Um, and we have tools and services that make it easy for two businesses to collaborate with one another, whether they're, you know, you're in Detroit and your customers, you know, in Chicago or you're in Detroit and your customers are in Berlin or Dubai or any place around the world.

Full Transcript: https://bit.ly/2AzEttY
PROS Distribution Industry: https://bit.ly/2zvN5BC