What Is The Development Cost Of An App Like Alibaba?

What Is Alibaba?

Alibaba is one of the famous eCommerce marketplaces. According to BussinessInsider Alibaba has 231 million annual active buyers that make 11.3 billion orders per year with almost around 2.8 million online storefronts and more than 5,900 product categories Alibaba is one of the biggest eCommerce companies. It was founded on 28 June 1999 by Jack Ma with 18 friends and students.

Alibaba provides eCommerce services to the whole world but the majority of transactions are made domestically. Alibaba dominates the Chinese market just like Amazon dominates the U.S.Market.

The revenue of Alibaba keeps rising by triple percentage points year after year. Which makes it the second-largest Asian company to break the 500 billion dollar valuation mark. It has the 6th highest global brand valuation.

Features that make Alibaba Different From Others

Let’s put some light on the special features of Alibaba, a Company that makes Jack Ma’s worth cross 50 Billion dollars, they definitely have some smart strategies up their sleeves.

So to make your app like Alibaba you need to follow some of these strategies, some of them are:-

Unique Monetization Strategies:

Alibaba has become the preference of every seller and buyer in china outnumbering eBay China. Sellers and buyers can register for free on Alibaba, due to this strategy many buyers and sellers are attracted to Alibaba.  

They offer two types of membership:

Free Supplier Membership:

This membership should allow your vendor to register at most 50 items for free. However, on Alibaba, some restrictions prevent vendors to use free membership because so many unverified vendors are there on that platform

Gold Supplier Membership:

This membership includes no limit to list your product you do not have any limit like in free supplier membership, apart from that you get so many tools to improve your storefronts also.

Safety of Transaction:

The major concern of the users of eCommerce apps is always related to security, same goes with Alibaba. Customers want to know that whoever they buying stuff is a legit person or a fraud. Alibaba offers many features to satisfy its customers like verification of customers as well as seller, inspection services, feedbacks, etc.

Direct Search From The Platform:

The product listed on Alibaba are not listed in google’s response sheet, Alibaba make sure of that. To search for any product on Alibaba users need to go to Alibaba’s Application to search. This results in keeping the product away from the competing platform.

Unique Payment System:

Alibaba uses its own payment services known as Alipay. That is why you should also have your own payment services for your app like Alibaba. Also, the payment service used by Alibaba is Escrow which in building long-term relationships with sellers as well as buyers.

New Transaction Patterns:

Alibaba uses a very different transaction pattern that is C2B(Customers to businesses) while the whole world is using B2B, B2C, or C2C. This model meets customer’s demands and accelerates sales. Due to this customer is able to buy products at wholesale price. Apart from that, you can also use O2O (online to online) in your app like Alibaba.

 How Alibaba Makes Money?

There are various methods to earn money from your app like Alibaba. Some of these methods include:

Subscription Method:

Having a subscription is extremely useful. Because of that, vendors can make better storefronts. Also, Vendors who joined the gold subscription will get better tools and hence better-improved storefronts and even they get access to a variety of sophisticated management and analytical resources.

Value-added Services:

If an app is like Alibaba, it must provide some value-added services integrated with advanced technologies like data analytics, logistics, refunds, product showcasing, cargo shipping, etc.

Which will enhance the user experience and quality of your app.

Storefront Fees:

A Storefront features to attract visual attention to a business that is why they need to be good. And if you are planning to get an app like Alibaba it must provide tools that would help the vendor or seller to improve their storefronts and for that, your app will charge a fee to give the vendor access to those tools.

Online Marketing Services:

An app like Alibaba has millions of active merchants, So to display his/her product the vendor needs to pay. The position in the list are bidding, the highest bidder will get the top position in the list and respectively the least bidder will get the lowest position concerning a certain keyword.

That means your app should provide marketing services also.

Apart from that Alibaba also depends on many other services to get revenue worth 74 billion dollars like cloud computing and display services

What Is The Actual Cost Of An App Like Alibaba?

Usually, we have countless meetings before we start the improvement to have a rough estimate and determine the project’s scope. To calculate the cost for your app we evaluate some desired highlights and estimate the working hours required to build your app

The cost to develop an eCommerce marketplace like Alibaba depends on the features included and the functionality of the app which includes the technology used, platforms integrated, and many other things. An app like Alibaba with such a huge base requires many features like UI/UX design, Business analysis, Quality assurance, Front and Back end development. The number of necessary worker hours can be determined by the applications manifested design and the number of supported working systems and devices. To make all these features min of 8500 hours is required. Since the cost is estimated according to the number of working hours, the approximate cost is around USD 41000.

Conclusion

It took Jack Ma and his team 20+ years to create Alibaba a giant of eCommerce Marketplace. With a user base of 636 million from 18 employees to a total of 86000 employees. Think of this as an opportunity to get your app as Alibaba developed for your business. and with the guidance and help of the right mobile app development company, this dream will not be such difficult to pursue.