You'd be quite surprised. Alibaba.com itself isn't a retailer in the same sense as amazon. Pretty much used for bulk goods, importing, manufacturing, and outsou

You'd be quite surprised. Alibaba.com itself isn't a retailer in the same sense as amazon. Pretty much used for bulk goods, importing, manufacturing, and outsourcing. I know a lot of startups, in fact, that in the early stage source through Alibaba. The one I work at, for instance, gets our steady supply of infrared pens through Alibaba, but there are a lot of examples. I even had a friend back in high school who made a small fortune (relatively speaking) importing random things through it that he would sell at a tremendous markup here... Alibaba does, though, run other sites as mentioned in the article that are more along the lines of an eBay or Amazon and you would be right that those haven't caught on outside of China.