Rift Valley University

Department: - Weekend Computer Science

Fourth Year second semester 2019

Course Title: - E-commerce

Assignment One
Prepared Member by:-
Name Id
Biruk Ermias RVC/SDW/0059 /15
Solomon Mekonen RVC/SDW/0021 /15
Tsegaye Desalgn RVC/SDW/0055 /15
Desta godebo RVC/SDW/0050 /15
Girma Seyoum RVC/SDW/0043 /15
BuzyhuTilahun RVC/SDW/0026 /15

May 4/2019
 1. Introduction
Alibaba is the world's biggest e-commerce platform. Over 420 million people scooped up
$485 billion worth of stuff last fiscal year on Alibaba's sites. The company went public in
2014, raising $25 billion -- more than Facebook -- in the largest offering in the history of
the New York Stock Exchange.

Alibaba is a marketplace, a search engine and a bank, all in one.

Alibaba's e-commerce platforms cater to both Chinese and global consumers, though the
majority of its transactions are generated domestically. At its heart is Taobao, a Chinese
consumer-to-consumer website much like eBay. Tmall offers merchants official storefronts
to consumers in China. Alibaba and AliExpress connect businesses in China with buyers
around the world.

Alibaba has a financial affiliate that also runs a leading online payment platform called
Alipay. Alibaba has stakes in Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, as well as Youku
Tudou, a video platform akin to YouTube. It is also a major backer of Didi Chuxing, China's
dominant ride-hailing app and an investor in Uber rival Lyft in the U.S. It has made
investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars each into various sectors including
Singapore's postal service, the photo- and video-sharing app Snapchat, newspaper
publisher South China Morning Post group and upstart Chinese smartphone maker Meizu.
It is building up a cloud computing and internet infrastructure business, setting up data
centers in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

2. Overview
Alibaba Group's mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. ... An ecosystem has
developed around our platforms and businesses that consists of consumers, merchants,
brands, retailers, other businesses, third-party service providers and strategic alliance
partners.

Alibaba makes money through many other subsidiaries.

We enable businesses to transform the way they market, sell, operate and improve their
efficiencies. We provide the technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help
merchants, brands and other businesses to leverage the power of new technology to
engage with their users and customers and operate in a more efficient way.

Our businesses are comprised of core commerce, cloud computing, digital media and
entertainment, and innovation initiatives. In addition, Ant Financial, a company in which
we have agreed to acquire a 33% equity stake, provides payment and financial services to
consumers and merchants on our platforms. An ecosystem has developed around our
platforms and businesses that consists of consumers, merchants, brands, retailers, other
businesses, third-party service providers and strategic alliance partners.

3. Background
Alibaba Group was established in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma , a former English
teacher from Hangzhou, China. From the outset, the company’s founders shared a belief
that the Internet would level the playing field by enabling small enterprises to leverage
innovation and technology to grow and compete more effectively in the domestic and
global economies. Since launching its first website, helping small Chinese exporters,
manufacturers and entrepreneurs to sell internationally, Alibaba Group has grown into a
global leader in online and mobile commerce.

Today the company and its related companies operate leading wholesale and retail online
marketplaces as well as businesses in cloud computing, digital media and entertainment,
innovation initiatives and others.

4. Business model 
Business model of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce platform that connects buyers and
sellers all over the world. ... Alibaba is an ecosystem of marketplaces. Their vision is to
build the future infrastructure of commerce. Their mission is to make it easy to
do business anywhere.
Alibaba.com (Business2Business) & 1688.com (Business2Consumer)

Alibaba began operations in 1999 with Alibaba.com, an English- language marketplace for
global trade. Alibaba.com was founded to help small exporters engaged in manufacturing
and trading, primarily located in China, to reach global buyers. The Alibaba B2B e-
Commerce model has since grown to include business-to-consumer and consumer-to-
consumer sales much like the Amazon marketplace. Alibaba is poised to be the only e-
Commerce ecosystem that could take on Amazon. 

In 1999, Alibaba also launched a Chinese-language wholesale marketplace for domestic

China trade among small businesses, now called 1688.com. This domestic platform has
since evolved into a wholesale channel for merchants doing business on their retail
marketplaces to source products.

Taobao.com (Consumer2Consumer)

In 2003, Taobao Marketplace was established as a free platform for buyers to explore and
discover products and for sellers to establish a low-cost online presence. According to
iResearch, Taobao Marketplace was the number one consumer-to-consumer, or C2C,
marketplace in terms of gross merchandise volume in China in 2013.

Although Alibaba focuses on business-to-business trade, it also supports other trade

through e-commerce web portals. Taobao is for consumers to trade, whereas Tmall is for
the upcoming middle class of China to purchase branded products.

Alipay (PayPal-like service)

In 2004, Alipay was established to address the issue of trust between buyers and sellers
online. Buyers were unwilling to effect payment before receiving and inspecting their
purchases, and sellers were unwilling to ship the products until they were assured that
payment was forthcoming. This lack of trust posed a stifling challenge for the development
of online commerce in China. Alipay introduced its escrow service as a solution to this
problem. Since 2011, Alibaba no longer controls nor has an ownership interest in Alipay,
although Alibaba continues to participate in some of the economic benefits of Alipay
through contractual arrangements. Alibaba has entered into contractual arrangements
with Alipay through which they are able to facilitate the provision of payment and escrow
services for Alibaba customers.

Aliwangwang & Alimama

In 2004, Aliwangwang was launched, a personal computer-based instant messenger that

facilitates text, audio and video communication between buyers and sellers, on the Taobao
Marketplace. In 2007, Alimama was launched as an online marketing technology platform
that offers sellers on Alibaba’s marketplaces online marketing services for both personal
computers and mobile devices. Alimama also offers sellers these marketing services
through third- parties through the Taobao Affiliate Network, which Alibaba believes is the
largest online marketing affiliate network in China in terms of revenue shared with
affiliates. In 2007, the company also started to monetize the Taobao Marketplace through
pay for pay marketing services and display marketing.

Tmall (Premium Goods Online Market)

In 2008, Alibaba launched Tmall as they recognized that Chinese consumers had developed
an increased demand for branded products and a premium online shopping experience.

5. Payment Strategies (transaction)

When sourcing on Alibaba.com, you can place either an order online (via Alibaba.com) or
offline (by contacting the supplier by yourself). 

In order to get protection, we strongly recommend placing orders online. In this way, we
can help you track your order and provide a refund in case of a dispute.

You can either place an online order using Trade Assurance or Secure Payment services:
- Trade Assurance covers buyers on Alibaba.com with 100% payment protection with their
selected Trade Assurance suppliers. 
- Secure Payment protects your payment until you have confirmed receipt of the goods. 

Always be cautious of using untraceable wire service transfers with suppliers that you do
not know. 
Alibaba.com is a B2B website catering to the needs of suppliers and buyers. The target
audience of the website is always some other company or its employees. On a B2B website,
exchange of products, services or information takes place between businesses rather than
between business and consumer. Such websites suffer from greater usability challenges
than other websites because the products are quite complex and they are often services,
customers are more diverse and buying process is much more complex as it has many steps
to be completed. Alibaba.com is the undisputed leader in e-commerce for small businesses
and the flagship company of Alibaba Group. It was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou, China.
Alibaba.com makes it possible for millions of buyers and suppliers around the world to do
business online easily. Alibaba.com offers a wholesale platform for small buyers on the
global site seeking fast shipment of small quantities of goods. Together, these marketplaces
form a symbiotic association of more than 50 million registered users in more than 240
countries and regions. Besides this, it also offers business management software and
Internet infrastructure services targeting businesses across China, and also provides
educational services to nurture enterprise management and e-commerce professionals.
Alibaba.com has offices in more than 60 cities across Greater China, Japan, Korea, Europe
and the United States. It has more than 4000 employees.

Just like other e-commerce platforms of Alibaba, Aliexpress makes money by charging
commissions as a percentage of the transaction value of goods sold. The commission range
from 5% to 8% of the transaction value. However, Aliexpress also charges a fixed $1500 +
store fee to start or change the store on the platform.

6. Alibaba program language

Website Background
Description on Homepage:- Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters & Importers from the
world's largest
Online B2B marketplace-Alibaba.com.
Find quality Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers,
Buyers,
Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads from our award
winning
International Trade Site. Import & Export on alibaba.com
Online since:-15 April 1999

Popularity rank: - Number 172 of all websites according to Alexa

Main visitors locations :- Country Visito Country

rs Rank
China 18.4% 68
India 12% 59
Server-side Programming United 4.3% 419 Languages
- PHP is a popular States scripting language for
creating web pages. 

- Java is a general-purpose language originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Client-side Programming Language

- JavaScript is a lightweight, object-oriented, cross-platform scripting language,
mainly used within web pages.

Markup Language
- HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard.

Character Encoding
- UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character
encoding for Unicode, which is backwards compatible with ASCII.

Image File Formats

- JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a lossless compression method
suitable to store photographic images.
- PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless compression image format,
suitable to store graphics with uniformly colored areas, and originally introduced as
a free, open-source successor of GIF.
- GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a lossless compression image format,
originally introduced by CompuServe and suitable to store graphics, logos and
simple animations.
Site Elements
- External Cascading Style Sheets define style rules in a separate CSS file.
- Embedded Cascading Style Sheets define a set of style rules in a <style> element
 within a web page.
- Inline Cascading Style Sheets define style rules directly within an (X)HTML
element using the style attribute.
- Session cookies are temporary cookies, which are deleted when the user closes the
browser.
- Persistent cookies with an expiration time of more than 10 years.
- HttpOnly cookies are used only in the HTTP protocol and not in client side scripts,
which may increase security.
- Non-HttpOnly cookies are used in the HTTP protocol and in client side scripts,
which may be a security threat.
- Non-secure cookies may be used via an unencrypted connections, which may be a
security threat.
- Gzip (GNU zip) is a file compression algorithm.
- HTTP/2 is the second major version of the HTTP network protocol.
- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) defines a mechanism enabling web sites
to declare themselves accessible only via secure connections.

Structured Data Formats

- The Open Graph protocol, originally developed by Facebook, is an RDFa-based
format that enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
- Generic RDFa (Resource Description Framework in attributes) is RDFa without
further specialization.

SSL Certificate Authority

- GlobalSign is an IT security service provider, also operating as SSL certificate
authority.

Traffic Analysis Tool

- Google Analytics is a free service to get detailed statistics about the visitors of a
website, provided by Google.

Web Server
- Apache Tomcat is an open source Java servlet container that functions as a web
server, developed by the Apache Software Foundation

Web Hosting Provider

- Alibaba a Chinese e-commerce company.
Reverse Proxy Service
- Akamai is a content delivery network.

Top Level Domain

- .com :- Commercial entities

Server Locations
- United States , Netherlands and China
Content Languages
- English ,Russian ,German ,Spanish ,French ,Japanese ,Portuguese ,Italian ,Turkish 
Dutch, Flemish ,Korean ,Vietnamese ,Arabic ,Thai

 
7. Security
Alibaba.com Secure Payment aims to provide a safe payment service for all parties engaged
in international trade. By partnering with an independent online payment platform
(Alipay), Alibaba.com provides payment security to both buyers and suppliers.

Alibaba will send Email notifications to the buyer and supplier at every step of the process.
Please be aware that emails from: transaction@notice.alibaba.com are notifications
pertaining to your order.

How does it work?

1. Buyer places order online
2. Buyer Payment
3. Supplier ships order
4. Buyer receives order and confirms online
5. Payment released to supplier

Payment Security
Your money is not released during the trade process until you have confirmed successful
delivery of the order. Once confirmed, Alibaba will release payment to the supplier. All of
your information will be safely encrypted.

Full Refund

If the supplier does not ship your order on time, or if you do not receive it and it is
determined to be the fault of the supplier, you will get your payment returned directly.

Partial Refund & Keeping Products

If the products you receive are significantly different from the product requirements
agreed on within the contract, you may choose to receive a partial refund and keep the
products.

8. Architecture

1. Migrating to the Alibaba Cloud computing platform brings users a wide range of
benefits. These benefits include the use of appropriate technical strategies and best
practices to solve application issues, such as effective use of caching, service
atomization, database segmentation, asynchronous performance problems, as well
as automatic monitoring/operation and maintenance.
2. A common scenario that migration to the cloud resolves is Large Concurrent Traffic.
This scenario involves high levels of traffic and QPS/TPS that exceed 2000. For this
scenario the database capacity needs to be greater than 1T in order to perform BI
(business intelligence) and data warehouse needs of the application. For such a
scenario, you may use the following architecture:
3. Load Balancing Layer: Server Load Balancer provides traffic load balancing.
4. Web Service Layer: Web server cluster runs on ECS instances and can be flexibly
expanded (a minimum of two instances are recommended).
 5. Application Service Layer: Application server cluster runs on ECS instances and
uses Server Load Balancer to load balance, as well as flexibly expand (a minimum of
two instances are recommended).
6. Data Storage Layer: RDS\DRDS on a MySQL database is used to create a highly
available, flexible extension of the relational database service. OSS then supports
massive unstructured distributed storage, and OTS supports high-performance
distributed queries of massive structured data. Finally, ODPS supports data
warehousing and large data storage and analysis.
7. This scenario design is also used as a common architecture for other business
scenarios.

 Technical diagrams: UML, ERD, DFD, PERT, Network diagram, Wiring, PFD, P&ID,

and more
 Business diagrams: ArchiMate, BPMN, SWOT, Value Chain, Value Stream
Mapping, Org. Chart, and more
 Cloud architecture design tool: AWS, Azure, Google
Cloud, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba, Tencent
 Data
visualization: Dashboard and charts (Column, line, pie, doughnut, area, scatter, bu
bble, radar, heat map, etc)
 Powerful Flowchart, Infographic, Floor plan, Mind map and Venn diagram tool
 Process Map Designer with templates like Customer Journey
Mapping, Competitor Analysis, Root Cause, etc