Have you heard about the recent ezbuy/Alibaba saga? If you’re not an ezbuy user, you might be left wondering what this hoo-ha is all about.

Since everyone’s talking about it (ok that’s a mild exaggeration), here are some things which you need to know to keep yourself updated on this issue.

Alibaba is cutting off ezbuy

Alibaba is basically owned by China’s richest man, Jack Ma. And Alibaba owns a whole range of businesses – from Alipay to Yahoo! China to South China Morning Post.

One of the biggest companies they own is Taobao – the online marketplace where you can practically buy everything and anything.

Taobao is not exactly the most user-friendly site especially for non-Chinese users because everything is in Chinese.

So Ezbuy founder He Jian set up his own forwarding business to help Singaporeans buy and ship over Taobao items to Singapore. Like an agent.

Ezbuy has been doing that since 2010 but Alibaba chose to freeze many of its purchasing accounts before Singles’ day sale on 11 Nov (the largest online shopping day in the world).

Apparently Ezbuy is not one of their official forwarders but why did it take Alibaba so long to “kill” them off?

Alibaba owns 83% of Lazada now

In case you missed this news, Alibaba raised its stake in e-commerce firm Lazada from 51 percent to 83 percent in June.

Right now, you can shop for some 400,000 Taobao items on Lazada’s website.

From a business perspective, it probably makes more sense for Jack Ma to earn a cut from every transaction from the Taobao sellers and the forwarders.

Ezbuy was not an approved forwarder but it has been raking in sales for Taobao sellers, contributing to Alibaba’s overall revenue.

Since Alibaba bought over Lazada, which is essentially Ezbuy’s competitor, the company’s strategy is probably to gain control of the market and not allow Ezbuy to get a slice of the pie.

Ezbuy started facing problems since Nov 4

Ezbuy’s purchasing accounts on Taobao started to face technical issues on Nov 4, when they launched the 11.11 big sale.

At first, Taobao system said too many people were checking out their carts at one go so Ezbuy had to wait a while before trying again.

On Nov 6, Taobao’s customer service told them that their accounts are abnormal but they cannot reveal why the accounts are abnormal.

From Nov 8 onward, their accounts have been slowly frozen. More than a thousand accounts have been suspended before Singles’ day.

Long letter to Jack Ma

Ezbuy’s founder wrote a really long letter to Jack Ma, asking him to explain the suspension and if their buying data on Taobao and Tianmao (a higher end Taobao) have been shared or accidentally revealed to Lazada.

At the end of the letter, he called Alibaba “really big bullies” for torturing small online outfits like them.

Alibaba responded by saying that Ezbuy’s act of reselling and profitting has severely hurt consumers’ and sellers’ rights. They also have the right to close users of multiple accounts if it has breached Taobao’s user agreement.

Of course, Alibaba has every right to make this business decision but why did they choose to abruptly cut off Ezbuy right before Singles’ day? 

All we can say is…it’s a very shrewd move.

Read Ezbuy’s full letter here and Alibaba’s response here.

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