Review | Six Billion Shoppers, former Alibaba vice-president’s broad view of e-commerce

Six Billion Shoppers
by Porter Erisman
St Martin’s Press

Porter Erisman’s previous book, Alibaba’s World (2015), provides an insider’s perspective on Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group and its founder and executive chairman, Jack Ma Yun, and is arguably the most revealing read on the company to date.

One of Alibaba’s earliest overseas recruits, Erisman served as vice-president from 2000 to 2008, with responsibilities for international marketing and corporate affairs. Alibaba’s World is a fun tale that covers everything from Ma’s vision and the company’s foundation and first initial public offering, in Hong Kong, to its return to private holding, diversification into business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer models, its besting of eBay and its second IPO, which valued the group at US$25 billion, making it the world’s largest. (Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, is now worth almost US$500 billion.)

Erisman’s new book, Six Billion Shoppers, takes a broader perspective, arguing that shortcomings in commercial infra­structure in the developing world have provided substantial opportunities for (rather than impediments to) e-commerce. The author undertakes a whirlwind tour and surveys the digital retailers he believes are “winning the global e-commerce boom”.

Six Billion Shoppers begins by analysing the Chinese e-commerce sector, demonstrating why its trajectory was not determined by the American tech giants, which most pundits believed had laid a path for allcomers to follow. Alibaba’s success has proven that alternative routes are possible in the digital world. It’s a story that emerging nations are keen to hear, and which Alibaba and the Chinese government are keen to tell.