Well before the Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba began making IPO rumblings in America, I was familiar with its offerings.
Not only have I stumbled across Alibaba products many times over the years, as an entrepreneur I’ve been intrigued with this company that is bigger than Amazon and eBay combined – and is almost unknown to Americans.
I’d never bought anything from it … until this month.
After hearing all the stock excitement, I wanted to see how the experience of this soon-to-be-global company matches up with the sites I use regularly, so I did a little experiment. I searched one of its subsidiaries, AliExpress, for something I’d never heard of: a watch with a denim band.
Our senior programmer at OnMilwaukee.com is a bit of a self-professed raw denim nerd, and I figured I’d spend a few bucks to buy him a token of my appreciation of his hard work. My search for "denim watch" yielded 627 resulted, and in fact several looked good and cheap; $5.99, $5.79 and $11.93, all with free shipping. It seemed worth the minimal risk to at least get some good blog fodder.
While each of the transactions worked, Alibaba feels very much Chinese – or at least non American. The omnipresent generic, slightly fuzzy stock photography, the Asian style kerning of the fonts, even the verbiage itself; it’s clearly not written by native English speakers. Even the available credit cards that can be used for purchase include several brands I’ve never heard of, and I’ve done enough international traveling to recognize non-American financial institutions. Notably, Paypal is missing.
But three things jumped out at me as major red flags in a all of this. The hoops one has to jump through to buy multiple items are significant; there’s no commitment when you click "buy," and the shipping time is snail-like, at best.
Keep in mind that AliExpress is a little like a less crafty version of Etsy; you’re dealing one-on-one with the creators of the items directly in China, language barriers and all.If you buy three watches, you have to check out three times. There is no unified system. Though I considered myself a sophisticated Internet user, their system didn’t leave me feeling very secure about these purchases.
Which leads to my second apprehension: when you buy an item, you can actually renege on your commitment. Unlike Amazon or eBay, you don’t actually have to pay for something if you don’t want to. You’ll just get a barrage of emails until the transaction cancels itself, as was the case with the second watch I "bought."
And finally, shipping takes forever. Some 28 days after my two finalized purchases, one of the watches showed up. The other has not yet. Clearly, Alibaba knows this is an issue, because this email showed up today, too:
As for the quality, well, that remains to be seen. Look, most of the cheap junk we buy is made in China anyway, so what’s the difference in buying cheaply direct or through layers of middlemen at Target? Nick actually liked his watch, but at only $6, it was a risk I was willing to take.
Still, Alibaba and its subsidiaries have a long way to go until they are mainstream enough for Americans. Play around with AliExpress a little and you’ll realize that while it has tons of potential, it’s just a little too awkward to pass the "mom test," which as a Web developer, is the standard by which I judge even our own work. If our moms feels comfortable using an app or site, then it’s good to go. If they’re stumped, then it’s not. As you can see, a lot of this looks somewhat unfamiliar to those who used Amazon regularly. What is this colorful iTao.com? Can "Eva" really help me?
Little details, maybe. But little details add up. I’m surprised that founder Jack Ma hasn’t hired a slew of American UI experts to deal with this front-end disconnect. Especially as Yahoo (which has its own problems, of course) is still a major stakeholder. Ma certainly has the money; I wonder what he’s waiting for.
Alibaba may someday take over the world. But if my denim watch experiments were indicative of where the company is going, I don’t expect it to happen any time soon.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
