Alibaba Entry To India's E-commerce Market

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is set to enter into the Indian e-commerce market by using UCWeb browser app. The company is planning to build a recommendation engine for existing e commerce platform in India.

Alibaba is planning to partner with e-commerce firms like Flipkart and PayTM Mall for the recommendation engine and this service would launch within this year.

UCWeb Global Business Vice President Huaiyuan Yang quoted that “ We have Alibaba’s e-commerce gene in us. We are actually trying to start innovative business model related to e-commerce. We are going to launch a new e-commerce product in India this year.

The recommendation engine is expected to be a platform that would showcase products from different e-commerce platforms for people to browse through it. If customers want to buy the product it will be directed to the actual website.

Alibaba holds 30.5 % stake in PayTM and 3% stake in Snapdeal. Yang dismissed speculations that Alibaba’s entry into India’s e-commerce would affect PayTM’s business.

Why Alibaba is coming through UCWeb?

UCWeb’s UC Browser has been available in India since 2009. It claims to have registered 1.1 billion user downloads worldwide, excluding china whit half of its global installs from India. It also claims to have 130 million monthly users in the country, which would be a good starting point for the e-commerce service.

Yang also added that “ E-commerce is a very vast business. There are various part of e-commerce business and several products. UC will choose section according to our business. We will partner with the right players and we will not compete with them (PayTM)”.