In this read, you will be able to check the features that alibaba.com provides and how they can easily be achieved using the Webkul’s modules. This case study will allow you to create an e-commerce marketplace website just like the Alibaba.

Alibaba.com is one of the world’s biggest marketplace mainly and majorly selling products of China. The portal began in 1999, it is a Business to Business (B2B) portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. The marketplace is having many unique features which help the buyer and seller to sell or purchase products easily.

Well, creating a marketplace like the Alibaba is now just easy using the Magneto 2 platform and Webkul’s Marketplace + Add-ons. let’s check what features does Alibaba offer and how those features can be achieved easily using the Webkul’s modules.

You can see the home page of Alibaba with different features like the categories, sign-in option, banner slider, a banner at the top, a search bar as shown below.

Now create categories according to your need in the Magento 2 Marketplace Multi-Vendor module. You can create the categories from the admin backend and the sellers can access those categories under their seller account.

For showing the featured products, new products, loved stuff, categories, the best seller of the month on the home page you can make use of the Magento 2 Marketplace Responsive template as shown below.

In Alibaba, you can log in as a buyer or a seller and both can sell or purchase the products. It is seen that the signup page for both has various different fields to gather more information.

You can make use of the Webkul’s Magento 2 Marketplace Vendor Attribute Manager. This extension will allows the admin to create vendor’s custom attributes. These extra information fields need to be filled in by the seller while registering.

Alibaba.com

Here, every seller has his own section where the relevant information regarding the seller is shown like their company profile, owners history, videos about the company, pictures of their manufacturing units, pictures of their employees, etc.

Webkul

Our seller profile page has the seller’s image, location, the seller can add return and shipping policies, can see the recently added products, etc.

Alibaba provides membership for the sellers wherein the gold members are having free listings and the free members only get 50 listings a month.

We have our Magento 2 Marketplace Seller Group extension that allows the admin to categorize sellers into Gold, Platinum, Silver and many more groups. These Groups will restrict the seller to upload a certain amount of product to his account, e.g. it will limit the number of product upload. Admin can restrict seller/vendors based on product quantity & time.

On each and every product page there’s a button that allows the contact to the seller and this is a feature that is very useful for the buyers and sellers.

This feature can be achieved through Magento 2 Marketplace Buyer Seller Chat extension. With the help of this extension, buyers can chat with the marketplace sellers. Magento 2 Marketplace Buyer Seller Chat allows customers to receive instant replies from the sellers. Each seller can do instant messaging with multiple customers at once. All the chat conversations are stored in the chat history section.

This is a wonderful feature that is offered by Alibaba. Whenever the buyer goes to the product page can see some related advertisement of similar products offered by different sellers.

This feature can be achieved by our Magento 2 Marketplace seller Price Comparison extension by which multiple sellers can add the same product which does exist in the global catalog with a different price. Using this module, Sellers can assign products to the new price, quantity, and condition Like New or Used.

The major feature that Alibaba provides is the quote and minimum order quantity. This feature is there because Alibaba is the world’s biggest business to business (B2B) portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers.

Here, it can be seen that the buyers can order a minimum quantity 100 in the above image and now in the next image you will see that how the buyers can get the quote or the recent price of the product.

Whilst purchasing with the minimum order quantity is the major feature that Alibaba provides and can be achieved via Magento 2 Marketplace Quote System extension.

Seller will enable the quote status as Enable and set minimum quote quantity under Product Page so that the customer can quote for that product.

After enabling the quote status for the particular product, customers can give their quote.

When customer will click on “Quote This Product” below pop up will open. Here customers can enter Quote details.

For serving the customer requests, Alibaba has a service tab in every page which is a unique feature in Alibaba’s portal as shown below.

For the customer support, webkul has a dedicated Online Helpdesk – Customer Support Ticket System. For further information about the support system, you can always email us at support@webkul.com.

Alibaba also provides the social login(Facebook and linkedIn) for the buyers and sellers on the login page.

Webkul provides the social login via the Magento 2 Social login extension that allows the users to sign up into their site using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Instagram.

In Alibaba.com for most of the products you have to quote the seller at first then they will allow you to add the product to the cart because the Alibaba.com is primarily a B2B site but there are some sellers who provide the B2C transactions so you can easily purchase their products. Now we will show you how you can purchase a product.

This is the checkout page and it contains all the information about the product along with the information of the sellers and the buyer.

In the below screenshot you will see the contact information of the buyer and the seller. Buyer can write any remarks for the shipping, payments, products, etc.

Now after filling up the contact information, the customer will move to next level where payment information is displayed.

After completion of the payment information, the buyer has to select the shipping method.

So, that’s how you can purchase a product from the Alibaba.com.

Let’s get ahead and see how we can swiftly make a checkout in Magento 2 marketplace. After the customer has added the products to the cart the customer will click on ” Go to Checkout” button in the cart, this will take him to the first step of checkout. Here, the buyer will select his shipping address, select the shipping method to use and then click the next button to proceed as shown below.

After this, the buyer will select the payment method and select his billing address and click the “Place order” button to complete the purchase.

Some other remaining features that Alibaba provides are –

Layered Navigation

Alibaba.com provides a layered navigation for the buyers so that they can easily search for their desired products. As we all know Alibaba.com is having a wide and versatile range of products so finding the right product is very difficult for the buyer and by using the layered navigation buyers can easily find the right product for the purchase.

We will be able to achieve this feature using the Magento 2 Advanced layered navigation extension. This will help your customer to search for their desired product without investing much time.

Buyer can filter multiple attributes at a time and see the current selection directly in a search box.

Alibaba.com gives a unique feature to the buyer to chat with the seller, so that customer can easily ask queries about the product, price, delivery&shipment etc.

This kind of feature is available and you can easily add this feature to your marketplace by using the Webkul’s Magento2 marketplace Buyer Seller Chat Module. The customer will find a contact us link on the product page. Here the customer can ask query to the seller and can also see the response rate and response time of queries for that particular product of that seller.  This will increase the goodwill of the seller among the buyers and it will also create a strong relationship between buyer and seller. It is very much beneficial for the seller to retain customers for a long time.

Once buyer clicks on “Contact Us” then a pop-up will open with contact seller form. Here customer has to fill in all the details such as Support Type, name, email id, subject for the query, query description which customer can write in the WYSIWYG editor and can attach multiple images related to the query.

That’s all for the case study of Alibaba. Now, you will be able to easily create a website or marketplace like Alibaba.com by using our Magento 2 Marketplace add-ons to flourish your e-commerce business around the world.

Hope you have understood how to create Alibaba Clone Using Magento 2 and Webkul’s Marketplace with its add-ons.

You can visit our store WEBKUL and you can explore more beneficial add-ons for the Marketplace.

Disclaimer–

Alibaba.com is a registered trademark. Webkul is not a partner or an affiliate of Alibaba.com. This blog is only for the user perspective.