OneTouch service offers exporters one-stop shop

Alibaba.com, the business-to-business unit of the Hangzhou-based e-commerce conglomerate, said on Tuesday it will offer subsidies to encourage Chinese suppliers to use the company's online export services.

Alibaba.com said it will pay manufacturers and suppliers up to 0.03 yuan for every $1 in value of export transactions handled through OneTouch, the Shenzhen-based integrated foreign trade services company. OneTouch, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, provides Chinese exporters with online services, including customs clearance, trade financing, foreign exchange and logistics.

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"Alibaba Group has built up an entire ecosystem based on domestic commerce due to the large transactions on taobao.com and tmall.com. What we are trying to do here is to establish a system focused on foreign trade," said Wu Minzhi, vice-president of Alibaba Group and head of Alibaba.com.

According to Wu, export transactions require a lengthy process, including customs clearance and tax rebate applications, which can generate a large amount of data. But there is no one platform that can integrate all the data to build up a credit system to allow buyers and suppliers to easily determine each other's trustworthiness and strengths.

Through offering export subsidies, Alibaba's OneTouch is expected to accumulate the data online to eventually build up a credit system to see whether certain buyers are qualified to receive loans, she said.

Alibaba Group filed last week for what could end up being the biggest initial public offering ever seen in the United States. Wu said the subsidies the company is offering has nothing to do with the IPO but are merely in line with Alibaba's mission to "make it easy to do business anywhere".

Exporters are facing increasing challenges from the rising costs of labor and materials amid a slow economic recovery in China's traditional export markets. The Canton Fair, the country's largest trade fair, which closed in early May, saw its export volume drop 12.64 percent year-on-year to 191.18 billion yuan ($31.05 billion).