I knew of Alibaba years before the IPO hype. Being able to directly connect with China manufacturers for large orders of almost anything you can think of at the lowest possible prices is of course good business. It seemed shady though from a buyer protection standpoint just giving credit card info to this site for a large pallet-size order shipped from the other side of the world, not having had what we do now about this company in the spotlight becoming a household name and gaining trust. Before the IPO, they already had more sales than eBay and Amazon combined, and that's probably just mostly from sales within China. "Alibaba is responsible for 80 percent of all online sales in China with only 46 percent of China's consumers currently accessing the Internet. As this latter figure grows and China's middle class continues to develop, Alibaba is well positioned for growth."
Alibaba should be able to make their sites more user-friendly now that they've raised 25 billions just on IPO day. Alibaba is mostly for large pallet-truck sized orders which don't have an actual given price, there's a price range something like $3-9 per unit with a 1,000 minimum. And when there's variations of the item, it's like asking 10 different times. How much is shipping to my Zip code per 1,000 units? Is shipping included? You have to message sellers and can't easily filter results from low-high price or high-low price and thus end up messaging tons of suppliers only to get a reply in hard-to-understand Changlish (no offence) which could be helped with better translation if needed. Sellers should be able to quickly and easily update actual set prices. Little things like that to make the site more user friendly and take off even more.
Just like the foudner Jack Ma said, now that they're earning trust with the IPO, the company will continue to grow, and instead of sharehodlers being the company's #1 priority like most other business models, Alibaba's main priority is customers which in turn helps shareholders.
AliExpress is an Alibaba site which is more for smaller orders with set price. Now that there's more trust from buyers and buyer protection, more people will shop there and in turn a lot of the Chinese sellers on eBay will migrate to AliExpress to enjoy lower fees and less hopps to jump through.
Alibaba recently launched 11main, a US-based eBay-type website that offers seller fees about 1/3 of eBay's ever-rising seller fees and hoops to jump through. There's been attempts at eBay clone sites that never really took off but Alibaba has the capital, power, and traffic to really cut into eBay's market.