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Comment by retroencabulato | Hacker News Reader

Superficially, the infrastructure needed to run Alibaba's retail website seems similar to the infrastructure needed to run Amazon's retail website.

What do you think Alibaba does?

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Alibaba isn't a retailer like Amazon. They're a retail platform that serves ads. They're a lot more like Google than Amazon. Amazon actually makes money in retail, Alibaba makes no money in traditional retail (~95% of their sales and income come from ads).

Assuming a large portion of that comes from Taobao+Aliexpress, maybe eBay is a more apt comparison?

But arguably, Alibaba doesn't yet have a global audience as Amazon does, IMO.

Iirc the largest online sales day in the world is Single's Day at Alibaba. Blows Black Friday out of the water. The tech capacity is impressive.

But it is reach we are talking about here. I am from China, so I understand how crazy Single's Day is and what an amazing job Alibaba has done to handle that amount traffic.

However, the overwhelming majority of Alibaba's customers is still Chinese. On the other hand, before AWS takes off, Amazon already sets up data centers in different countries and continents, because they are the leading online retailer over there. Same reason applies to Google. Their cloud business then cloud easily benefit from those established investments.

Whole Russia and Belarus (and i bet rest of ex-USSR countries) shop on aliexpress/alibaba. I would say nor Amazon nor Alibaba has true global presence - each represented in few countries without overlaps (for now)

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