Alibaba.com facilitates business buying and selling for global importers and exporters, business interactions for domestic businesses in China, and trade to and from Japan. A wholesale platform called Aliexpress.com enables smaller buyers to get fast shipment of small quantities of goods. Alibaba.com serves more than 50 million registered users, offers business management software and Internet infrastructure services, and provides educational services to help enterprises grow their businesses online.

Notably, Alibaba.com has out-maneuvered eBay in China – which makes the choice of eBay president and CEO John Donahoe to keynote Alibaba Group’s “Netrepreneur Summit” in September especially intriguing.

Alibaba.com, however, is just one of the impressive online brands operated by the Alibaba Group, who employs 18,000 people and whose Internet properties reach hundreds of millions of users in more than 240 countries and regions around the world.

Alibaba Group owns Taobao.com, China’s largest Internet retail website and one-stop platform for shopping socializing and information sharing. Launched in 2003, Taobao today has close to 200 million users. In 2009, Taobao recorded transactions exceeding $29 billion. Within Taobao are Alimama.com, an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for Chinese publishers, and Koubei.com, China’s leading classified listing website.

Then there is Alipay.com, the leading third-party online payment platform in China. Think of it as a Chinese PayPal for secure online payments. Alipay has more than 300 million registered users and partners with more than 65 financial institutions across China, as well as with Visa, to provide payment solutions for more than 460,000 Chinese businesses.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, Alibaba Group also owns China Yahoo!, putting the company into the search and Internet portal business. (Yahoo! owns 40% of Alibaba Group.) Another 30% of the company is owned by Softbank, a Japanese telecom and media giant. In fact, the Alibaba-Softbank relationship could represent the eventual Asian domination of the Internet, according to Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son, a close friend of Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma.

At a May 2010 event announcing a partnership between Taobao and Yahoo! Japan, which Softbank owns, Son said, “In the future if the Japanese market and Chinese market can merge into one, this can form a bigger e-commerce market and surpass the U.S. market.”

In late 2009, Alibaba Group spun off Alibaba Cloud Computing, a development company with the mission of building an advanced data-centric cloud computing service platform. Most recently, Alibaba Group acquired Vendio, a U.S.-based e-commerce platform with over 80,000 small business users in the United States.

Vendio may be the first U.S. investment for Alibaba, but it certainly won’t be the last. The company has committed $100 million to invest in U.S. companies. Alibaba CEO David Wei tells PracticalEcommerce.com that the company is looking for investments similar to Vendio, which he describes as “a multi-channel solution for retailers, which we believe is the future for small online retailers; not relying on just one platform, but diversifying their channels to as many areas as possible.”

It’s hard to believe Alibaba Group has been in business just eleven years, and less than three of those years have been as a public company. The firm’s considerable accomplishments are reason enough for Fast Company to rank Alibaba number 29 on its list of the "World’s Most Innovative Companies" in March.

As for the future, David Wei relates it to Alibaba’s past. He tells PracticalEcommerce.com, “Our mission for Alibaba.com is to make life and work easier for small business, no matter if it is located in India or Indiana. It’s our job to help small businesses and entrepreneurs, because 10 years ago, we were a small business and entrepreneur ourselves.”

It seems as if Alibaba has once again opened the door to a cave filled with fabulous treasure – only this time, it’s a treasure trove on the Internet.

Barry Silverstein has been a frequent brandchannel contributor since 2007. He has thirty years of advertising and marketing experience and is currently a freelance writer and marketing consultant. He founded and ran his own direct marketing agency and held executive positions with Epsilon, a leading database marketing firm and Arnold, a major ad agency. Silverstein is the author of three marketing books, including the McGraw-Hill book, The Breakaway Brand, which he co-authored with Arnold CEO Fran Kelly.