Alibaba Upgrades It’s Offerings. Improved Cash Flow and More.
How do you find a steady supply of products, and packaging materials, to fulfill your customer’s orders? Alibaba, has a suite of updated improvements.
Imagine you’re a company selling nutritional supplements. What if you’re a cosmetic company, selling a line of beauty products to women all over the USA (or the world, for that matter)? This is the dilemma that Necia Boston, owner of B.A.A.B.S and Daniel Rosen of Totally Products, LLC face on a constant basis.
Alibaba is the leader in connecting B2B companies who need to buy items to package and resell to their customers, and connect them with sellers.
On a recent media call with Alibaba, Necia explained that she uses Alibaba to find the packaging and other materials she needs to create her line of beauty products. Necia is just one of thousands of businesses who rely on Alibaba to create the products they need for their customers.
Recently Alibaba announced a few expanded offerings.
One solution is trade financing, which will powerful help smaller companies with cash flow as they seek to build their inventory prior to selling it to customers.
“We typically pay our suppliers upfront, which ties our cash up in inventory costs and keeps us from planning very far ahead and investing in our business,” said Necia Boston, founder of Greenville, N.C.-based B.A.A.B.S. Beauty, a makeup and beauty products retailer and early applicant of Payment Terms. “With Alibaba.com Payment Terms, we’ll be able to keep our costs competitive with larger beauty brands, plan for our future product lines and stock up far in advance of the back to school and holiday seasons.”
Alibaba.com Payment Terms is the first-ever trade financing solution, according to Alibaba, embedded directly into a cross-border B2B ecommerce marketplace, allowing qualified buyers to order goods and pay for them up to 60 days after they are shipped. Before today, the vast majority of cross-border trade between small businesses required full payment upfront.
Freight is another challenging part of B2B product buying.
It’s not like going to CVS or Walgreens and getting a package of 24 count toilet paper. No, imagine getting an entire pallet of items delivered.
With an average order size of $2,000, Alibaba.com shipments involve containers and pallets, not parcels and envelopes. The newly launched Alibaba.com Freight, powered by digital freight marketplace Freightos, helps SMBs simplify arranging their bulk shipments with the ability to instantly compare, book, manage and track ocean and air freight in real time online, effectively modernizing the analog, opaque and historically slow process for arranging cross-border logistics.
Trade shows is a large part of how buyers and sellers, can connect with each other.
They shake hands, and talk in real time. With Covid that type of networking is a thing of the past, at least for the foreseeable future.
According to Alibaba research, trade shows have historically been the most important way for sellers to meet and acquire new customers, and business buyers have benefited by using them to explore new products and suppliers. COVID-19 has drastically limited this critical channel for trade.
In response, Alibaba.com is launching Online Trade Shows USA, a series of category-specific, livestreaming experiences designed to convene quality buyers and sellers to meet and transact in real-time over a pre-determined period of days.
These events showcasing U.S.-based manufacturers and wholesalers are part of Alibaba.com’s global online trade show initiative2 of over 20 shows in the next 120 days to bring the world’s SMBs together over virtual show floors.
Covid19 is a terrible experience for all of us.
However, there’s many business owners who are using this time to open new businesses. These new entrepreneurs need parts and supplies to create products and solutions for their new companies and csutomers.