Sydney Software Firm Bigcommerce Teams Up With Alibaba To Beat Amazon

Fresh from its New York initial

public offering (IPO) that raised a record $25 billion fresh capital, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) has partnered with an Australian software company. Its team up with Bigcommerce is expected to further rival its US competitor Amazon.

Even before the IPO in September, Alibaba was generating revenues bigger than Amazon and eBay combined. But before its US debut, Alibaba transactions were mostly with Chinese buyers.

Under the partnership, Alibaba will integrate its buyers and supplier network with Bigcommerce users, allowing merchants to source their products directly from Alibaba suppliers, which would cut into Amazon's capacity to source cheaper items.

Bigcommerce has about 55,000 merchants, of which 10,000 are in Australia, and have processed about $5 billion sales. These include Collette Dinnigan, Etiquette and Bicycles Online.

The platform of Bigcommerce, based in Sydney and with branches in Austin and San Francisco, provides small and medium online retailers with tools they could use to process orders and analyse, and for ecommerce and marketing and even build online outlets using its framework.

Data generated using its Analytics include real-time sales, best-selling products, popular categories, average order value, purchase funnel analysis, abandoned carts, category-level merchandising and customer acquisition insights.

"This deal is designed to democratise components of e-commerce. What companies like Amazon do really is source products based on its buying power at an incredibly low cost and that pushes small businesses out of the market," said Bigcommerce founder Eddie Machaalani, quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald.

He added, "We want all our businesses across the world to be able to leverage off Alibaba's platform to source products at a low cost as well."

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