It is Jack Ma, not Vietnamese firms, who has been reaching every corner of  Vietnamese craft villages and inviting them to join his online trading floors. Why?

The current hot summer days could not prevent tens of businessmen from Ha Tay, Ninh Binh and Bac Ninh provinces to visit Bao Son Hotel in Hanoi to attend a workshop on e-commerce organized by a foreign firm.

After a workshop, tens of businesses signed contracts with new partners. Many other contracts on e-shop booking were also signed.

Hoang Son, the representative of a stone export company in Ninh Binh province, said the company was interested in e-commerce, trying to look for more export channels, but had not succeeded.

The owner of another business said he did not lack money, but manpower. Therefore, he is willing to spend money if someone can advise him how to do e-commerce.

Some months ago, the Dong Ky craft village in Bac Ninh received consultants from a foreign e-commerce firm who traveled tens of kilometers with motorbikes, and came to meet every businessman in the village to invite them to open e-shops.

Alibaba has been squeezing into every corner of the Vietnamese craft village to meet businessmen with limited knowledge about e-commerce, which has spent $1 billion to buy Lazada.

In fact, Vietnam has many B2B trading floors on which a lot of product types are traded, from steel to wooden products. However, the majority of them have shut down. These include very large one with 17,000 members, 23 business fields and 9,000 product items.

The two foreign online trading floors best known to Vietnamese businesses are alibaba.com and globalsources.com. As they have the global scale, importers and exporters can hope they can more easily find partners.

An analyst commented that the knowledge of Vietnamese small and medium businesses about e-commerce remains limited. They just know the names of trading floors, while they don’t understand the real benefits they can expect from the floors.

VECITA (the Vietnam e-Commerce and Information Technology Agency) has released a report on e-commerce development in Vietnam showing the list of 10 e-commerce websites with largest revenue. Lazada, which has been taken over by Alibaba, tops the list, followed by chodientu.vn.

Nguyen Hoa Binh, CEO of PeaceSoft Group, which now runs chodientu.vn, the e-commerce website which ranks second in sales in Vietnam, has affirmed that chodientu.vn, with good knowledge about the local market, will compete in equality with Lazada.

Source: Vietnamnet