Alibaba US jobs pledge showcases global strategy

Attendees watch a monitor displaying live updates of sales figures during Alibaba's annual Singles Day event in Shenzhen. [Photo/Agencies]

The US government has also just put Alibaba back on its blacklist for selling counterfeit goods. There are limited numbers of Chinese speakers in the US, fears of intellectual property theft and unfamiliarity with the mechanics of shipping goods to China.

The costs of marketing to a Chinese audience also may be prohibitive for small businesses, said Mark Tanner, founder of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based consultancy that advises US brands on selling to the country.

"A million full-time paying jobs in the US would be quite difficult," he said. "To be really successful in China, you need to be on the ground, be responsive in the middle of the night US time and also speak Chinese to really understand the customers."

Alibaba has solutions for those issues, Evans said, and they're called Taobao Partners. Hundreds of translation and customer-service agencies help US companies with details including corporate registrations, foreign exchange, product designs and returns. They're mostly China-based, third-party companies with offices in different time zones, Evans said.

"This is China. There's no problem you can't throw a thousand bodies at," said Michael Zakkour, the Asia Pacific practice vice-president of Tompkins International China who helps connect Western businesses with Taobao Partners.

He estimates there're as many as 6,000 of those.

He said: "As wave after wave of new brands come and start selling, those partners will easily add more capacity or a whole slew of new ones will pop up."

Alibaba also uses affiliate Cainiao Smart Logistics Network Ltd to help sellers such as New York-based Jed Stiller, whose Stadium Goods ships limited-edition Nike and Adidas sneakers from Delaware to Shanghai.

Stiller said as much as 10 percent of his projected $100 million in annual transactions comes from Alibaba's Tmall Global platform. If that reaches 15 percent, he may hire as many as 70 people to focus on that business.

"In order to scale this, we have to be able to help small businesses in the US with buyer and seller services," Evans said. "If they hired their own Taobao Partners, it would be way too expensive."