Alibaba.com, a leading platform for global business-to-business (B2B) trade, launched a landmark initiative today to help businesses in Bangladesh to go online and go global. This program is part of the broader 2020 Spring Thunder initiative by Alibaba Group to help SMEs survive and thrive via digitalization in the wake of the pandemic and to support them on their road to recovery.
The roll out of Project Sprout Up will help existing and potential Alibaba.com users in Bangladesh with better access to B2B trade opportunities available in the vast global market. Alibaba.com hosts more than 20 million active buyers from over 190 countries and regions, with an average of 300,000 inquiries made daily for goods ranging from raw materials to finished products in more than 30 major categories. Over 40,000 products from Bangladesh-based businesses are currently listed on the Alibaba.com platform, including items from key local industries such as apparel and textiles as well as leather products such as luggage and bags.
The project will aid SMEs in the country across three main areas – faster onboarding onto the Alibaba.com platform for establishing global reach, access to solutions designed to accelerate business growth and tailor-made training programs to help SMEs deepen their online capabilities.
“Unlike retailers who have adopted e-commerce more instinctively in the past few years, most B2B businesses are still to understand the potential of this space. Bangladesh is already recognized in terms of apparel and textile exports and can further accelerate their businesses through global B2B trade. This year more and more businesses are looking for sustainable business models and we believe that ecommerce can provide that opportunity and enable more SMEs move from recovery to tangible, sustained growth,” said Mr Zhang Kuo, General Manager of Alibaba.com.
Helping Businesses Go Online
Alibaba.com will help lower the barriers to entry for SMEs looking to kickstart or accelerate their online B2B trade operations. The solution offered will help new suppliers set up their e-commerce presence on Alibaba.com from scratch, and the Alibaba.com platform will provide special discounts for local SMEs joining the Alibaba.com platform as supplier members before 30 September 2020.
Bangladesh based businesses will also benefit from a new 90-day onboarding process onto Alibaba.com, which aims to boost traffic and generate additional business opportunities for new suppliers within the period.
To further support the move by businesses online, Alibaba.com will enlist professional third-party partners to help newly joined suppliers create an online store from the ground up, develop product listings and conduct keyword advertising. This package will be made complimentary for participating SMEs, with costs absorbed by Alibaba.com.
Helping Business Go Global
To provide businesses with more confidence when participating in global trade, Alibaba.com will be offering its Smart Marketing Solution, an intelligent keyword advertising tool, available for supplier members in the country. The tool draws on insights from the Alibaba.com platform and AI algorithms to help suppliers market their products with intelligent bidding without additional labour and investment required. Apart from enabling businesses to understand the demand for a product category, the Smart Marketing Solution will also adjust automatically the bidding price for their keywords to acquire new customer traffic and fine-tune their business strategies via a simple and basic interface even for businesses new to the Alibaba.com platform.
In addition, supplier members in Bangladesh will be provided with regular training programs and workshops to strengthen their performance on Alibaba.com while covering topics ranging from the basics in online business to online buyer behavior, business negotiations, customer support, marketing and more.
The 2020 Spring Thunder initiative by Alibaba Group was launched by Alibaba Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang in April 2020. The initiative deploys the power of commerce and technology that the Alibaba Group has harnessed over the past two decades to create new supply chains, stimulate new demand, and promote new trade through a series of measures. Alibaba.com has been enabling the growth of SMEs since 1999 with tools designed specifically for B2B trade. Supplier members on the Alibaba.com platform are entitled to a suite of tools and services including a custom digital storefront, buyer analytics, targeted advertising, and support in the form of online courses and live support, among others.
SMEs interested in learning more about Project Sprout Up can click here to fill in a survey form, after which a representative of Alibaba.com will reach out to them with further details. For SMEs interested in speaking with Alibaba.com’s local channel partners in Bangladesh, you may contact Daraz Bangladesh Limited or Tradeshi Limited.
About Daraz
Daraz is the leading online marketplace in South Asia, empowering tens of thousands of sellers to connect with millions of customers. Daraz provides immediate and easy access to 10 million products in more than 100+ categories and delivers more than 2 million packages every month to
all corners of its countries. Daraz is a mall, a marketplace and a community for its customers. It is also a university for entrepreneurs, and every month it educates more than 5,000 new sellers on e-commerce operations. To overcome the logistics challenge in its markets, Daraz has built its own logistics company specifically designed for e-commerce operations – Daraz Express (known as DEX) – to raise the standards for the industry. Daraz is also helping existing and new logistics providers digitize. In 2018, Daraz was acquired by Alibaba Group, and is proud to carry its part of the mission to ‘make it easy to do business anywhere in the era of the digital economy’. As part of the Alibaba ecosystem, Daraz is leveraging Alibaba’s global leadership and experience in technology, online commerce, mobile payments and logistics to drive growth in its markets.