Life of Online Shop Owner Behind Alibaba’s Listing

By Stella Hou

Student Journalist, HKBU

2014/12/12

386 words

Jiang Shanshan’s life doesn’t change after Alibaba listed its shares in New York this September.

As the biggest e-commerce company in China, behind Alibaba’s listing, there are 8.5 million active online shop owners. Jiang is one of them.

In 2009, Jiang quit her job as an insurance agent in Shenzhen and started to sell sportswear on her online shop on taobao.com, China’s largest shopping website, which is owned by Alibaba. Every week she goes to Hong Kong to stock goods from outlets.

Now, Jiang and her husband Yingjie Liu are running their online shop as full-time work in Shenzhen. Every day, they get 80 orders on average, which bring them profits about 10,000 yuan.

“My home is my warehouse. I even can’t separate my business and my own life,” Jiang said.

In Jiang’s two-story flat, thousands of sport shoes and wears can been seen in every corner. In Jiang’s closet, sportswear is put mixed with her own cloths.

Jiang works seven days a week but it’s always leisure on Saturday and Sunday since people prefer to go shopping online when they have fragmentary time of their working days from Monday to Friday.

Talking about whether she is satisfied with her life, Jiang doesn’t know how to answer this question. “It seems that we have respectable income but we have to put money in to stock goods. Also, I have to sit before the computer all the day, answering questions from customers which is a little boring,” she said.

Jiang was answering customers’inquiry in her bedroom, which is also her office and warehouse.

Jiang doesn’t think Alibaba’s listing can promote their business. “My husband and I are still afraid that one day Consumer-to-Consumer model will be instead of Business-to-Consumer,” Jiang said.

Now, more than a half of online shops on Alibaba are Consumer-to-Consumer model, which means shop owners buy in goods from other companies and sell then to individual customers. Just like Jiang buys in and sells Nike and Adidas sportswear but there is possibility that Nike will integrate its business and forbid individual online shops selling its goods.

Considering about this potential crisis, Jiang and her husband stared to run two hypostatic stores in different shopping malls in Shenzhen.

“If C2C model may fall into decay, we should have other choices,” Jiang said.