While Amazon has dominated the U.S. for years, Alibaba shares have increased 63.97% in the past twelve months, and a whopping 146.15% in the last two years. Amazon’s, meanwhile, have gained 67.76% and 121.44% during the same time period.

While there’s still some debate about which company will provide the most value to shareholders over the long-term, there’s also no doubt that Alibaba has carved out a niche for itself that allows it to continually outperform Amazon’s operating margins and remain a more profitable platform than its U.S.-based competitor.

Here’s what you need to know about the Alibaba vs. Amazon debate:

What you Need to Know About Alibaba

Alibaba is hot on the heels of Amazon. While Amazon is coming off of one of its best years yet, Alibaba continues to smash its numbers and outperform Amazon by a pretty wide margin. This year, Amazon’s stock has gone up 30%. Alibaba’s, meanwhile, has nearly doubled, and both Amazon recently became the first company to attain a market value of $1 trillion. There are two ecommerce giants, locked in a head-to-head battle with one another.

So, what’s the deal with Alibaba? How does it continue to outpace Amazon? Despite the fact that both are expanding into additional business ventures such as groceries, original content and the cloud, Alibaba remains the faster-growing and higher-valued platform. One of the largest reasons for this is the Chinese market. The Chinese middle-class is growing much faster than the U.S. middle class, and investors have put their hopes on Alibaba to remain a proxy for that growth. If it continues as projected, it stands to be a massive perk for the ecommerce platform, and the thing that continues to set it apart from Amazon.

Because of that growth, Alibaba has attracted some major backers in the hedge-fund space. It’s also earned a great deal of attention from analysts. Today, 47 brokers cover Alibaba, and not a single one has a sell rating. This is incredible seeing as Amazon has one sell rating out of the 44 analysts. This sell rating is about 17% of the mean target price of $1,150.46.

Today, Alibaba boasts a short position of about $23 billion. The next most shorted firm is Tesla, followed by Apple and AT&T. This ranking puts it in the company of giants, and virtually ensures it’s going to be one of the world’s most valuable companies for years to come.

The Current State of Amazon

In a world where brick and mortar stores are continuing to go under, Amazon has spent the last several years printing money. Last year, Amazon’s value peaked at an estimated $500 billion. At the same time, leading online retailers like Best Buy, Target, Costco, CVS and Walmart were worth about $411 billion combined.

Today, Amazon accounts for about 4% of all US retail sales and boasts some of the fastest-growing product categories, such as luxury and pantry items. As Amazon’s core demographic of millennials continues to grow up and develop, they’re shopping more and more on Amazon, which is driving the platform to grow to epic proportions. While it’s not quite competing with Alibaba, it is the most valuable and widely-used ecommerce platform in the U.S.

In 2017 alone, Amazon did more than $8 billion in electronics sales. This represents a year-over-year growth rate of 4%. During the same period, home and kitchen sales improved by 20%, publishing grew 3%, and sports and outdoors sales increased by 11%.

Here are some additional Amazon ecommerce statistics:

• Amazon grew by 50% in 2017.
• Amazon is now worth more than $1 trillion.
• Amazon bought Whole Foods for $14 billion.
• Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, worth more than $150 billion.
• Amazon unveiled seven private-label clothing brands in 2017.
• Amazon started streaming Thursday Night Football games for the NFL on Prime TV.
• Amazon’s HQ2 will add at least 50,000 jobs to the winning city.
• Bezos committed to investing $1 billion per year to save the world with his Blue Origin space exploration project.

Which One Will Come Out on Top?

As it stands right now, Alibaba boasts a more profitable business model than Amazon. This profitability is due in large part to key differences in how the two companies approach ecommerce.

While Amazon works to bring Walmart’s cost savings philosophy to the online environment. Amazon’s approach has worked well in the U.S., and it has secured a niche for itself as a high-volume, low-cost model that relies on massive scale and technology to create cost savings.

This has done well by Amazon, so far, although Alibaba has taken a different approach. Alibaba, by contrast, is working to build a more collective entrepreneurship platform and the ecommerce site relies more on a network business model, as a result.

For now, Amazon’s saving grace seems to be purely geographical. There’s no doubt that the company’s eBay-esque approach to ecommerce has taken off among Chinese consumers, or that it would be incredibly popular in the United States if given the chance.

Regardless of who ultimately comes out on top, there’s one thing nobody can doubt: that both Alibaba and Amazon have dominated the world of ecommerce and taken very different approaches to carve out their niche within it. As the ecommerce world continues to evolve, so will these dynamic and customer-centric shopping platforms.

At the end of the day, the question may not be Alibaba vs. Amazon, but, instead, how will both change the online environment forever?

As it stands now, Alibaba is commonly referred to as the “Chinese Amazon.” Although there are some unique differences between the two, Alibaba is a fast-growing platform that has the potential to give Amazon a serious run for its money in coming years.

Here’s what you need to know about the recent success of the Alibaba platform, and how it stands to grow in the coming years:

What is Alibaba?

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational conglomerate that specializes in AI, technology, retail, internet and ecommerce. Built on a consumer-to-consumer model, Alibaba also specializes in B2C and B2B sales services, as well as offering electronic payment services, cloud computing and a shopping search engine.

Named one of the world’s most admired companies by Fortune, Alibaba claimed the world’s highest IPO – sitting right around $25 billion. By June of 2018, the market value of the platform had grown to $542 billion, and it has been growing ever science. Currently, Alibaba is one of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies and is only the second Asian company to break the value cap of $500 billion USD.

Alibaba operates in more than 200 countries and territories, and is the world’s single largest online marketplace, as well as being one of the largest internet and AI companies and one of the largest VC firms in the world. Its online sales have surpassed all US retailers (including eBay, Amazon, and Walmart) combined since 2015.

In November of 2017, Alibaba orchestrated “Singles Day” in china, and claimed the world’s largest single-day online and offline shopping revenues, with sales reaching $25.4 billion.

2018 Alibaba Statistics to Chew On

Wondering about the Alibaba vs. Amazon comparison? While Alibaba launched in 1999, it’s quickly catching up to Amazon. Here are some statistics about Alibaba to keep you busy:

• Alibaba has upwards of 552 million shoppers and about 634 million monthly active mobile users.
• Alibaba boasts a 60% share of the Chinese ecommerce market.
• Alibaba’s cloud customers top 1 million.
• Ant Financial, an Alibaba spin-off established in 2011, has a reported market value of $100 billion and reaches about 520 million people annually.
• In FY of 2018, Alibaba has generated almost $40 billion in revenue.
• Alibaba’s FY 2018 core commerce revenue sits at $8.1 billion.
• Alibaba’s Singles’ Day revenue was $25.3 billion in 2017, which represents a 40% increase in the sales from the year before. These numbers did not take into account some sales that began earlier in the week and were designed to celebrate the event.
• The retailer also hit a record 18 billion in 13 hours on one of its single-day shopping events.
• Market research experts currently believe that the exponential growth of Alibaba is attributed to retailers who are actively competing for their share of consumer spending in China’s growing economy.
• During shopping holidays (designed largely to compete with Amazon’s Prime Day), Alibaba offers discounts on a wide selection of goods, including household items and electronics.
• Alibaba ships over 12 million packages to customers daily, as compared to Amazon, which ships 3 million.

Alibaba vs. Amazon

In recent years, there’s been some not-so-friendly competition between Amazon and Alibaba. In 2017, the CEO of Alibaba requested that people not compare the platform to Amazon because “it’s much bigger.” In the 12 months between 2016 and 2017, Alibaba partnered with global marketers such as P&G, Unilever and L’Oreal to develop a system it calls Uni-Marketing, which utilizes a data-driven marketing engine to support more than 500 million active shoppers.

Part of what contributes to Alibaba’s stunning success is its multidimensional approach to marketing. The platform offers video sites, social media (the Chinese version of Twitter is called Weibo), location-based navigation services similar to Google Maps and a wide selection of data services.

While it’s true that Amazon and Alibaba do go head-to-head on many things, it’s also true that Alibaba reaches a bit further than Amazon does, even on the best of days. Thanks in large part to its consumer-to-consumer marketplace known as Taobao, it’s B2C T-Mall, all the company’s various B2B services, as well as its messaging, cloud computing, social media, and map offerings, Alibaba has stood out as a much more comprehensive and further-reaching platform than Amazon in recent years.

At its core, the business model of Alibaba is just different than Amazon’s. The company doesn’t buy products from brands, it doesn’t buy and sell and then take a margin, and it doesn’t work as a channel the same way Amazon does. Instead, Alibaba operates as a marketplace – a bridge that connects sellers and buyers.

Because of this, many analysts are recommending that people think of Alibaba as a marriage between Amazon, Facebook and Google. It’s a powerful platform that has dominated ecommerce in China, and is rapidly becoming number one in countries like Russia and throughout Southeast Asia.

These results show no signs of slowing anytime soon, and it’s likely that Alibaba will only continue to grow in coming years.

The Future of Alibaba

A master of ecommerce, Alibaba has dominated cross-channel commerce throughout China, and is rapidly expanding into neighboring countries. A powerful platform with lots to offer, Alibaba is one of the most exciting tech companies out there and promises to remain so in the years to come. While Amazon remains the number one ecommerce platform in the United States, Alibaba is an expansive, exciting, customer-facing marketplace that has positioned itself for global shopping domination and plans to achieve it in the near future.

Need even more 2018 Alibaba statistics? We’ve got you covered with this infographic!