Alibaba (what a name for a Chinese company) is an online retail company that connects manufacturers (companies) to buyers and also individual sellers to buyers. They also have an online payment system - Alipay. Alibaba is like a ebay, paypal, and amazon all rolled into one.

"...Alibaba also now has the advantages that come with dominating its domain. In the West, shoppers often search for items on Google, and then follow a link, possibly one in an ad, to a retailer’s website or to Amazon; the ads are what make Google its money. In China Taobao’s scale means it can afford to block the “spiders” that search engines like Google, or its local equivalent, Baidu, use to find out what is on a site. It can do this because shoppers more or less have to come to it anyway. This makes adverts on Taobao more valuable; it gets a fair whack of the revenue that would otherwise go to the search engines"

Good infrastructure (roads, transport, post) in the US/China/EU make it possible for online retailers to do well. In India I think system inefficiencies eat into profits and make it difficult -

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-27/strat...