Now after my clickbait title I need to say that this isn't a defense of Alibaba, but rather an explanation as to the success of Alibaba and the dynamics (this will be boring). First, the Internet grew organically in the States and other Western nations slowly over 15 years. Most companies had an online presence first as a just as a catalog site with no ecommerce. Almost all retailers had one and just slowly grew in to online stores. We went from 0-60 over a period of many years and the mind share of URLs specifically is very fragmented. Add to that the fact that many more American companies have the money and expertise to build their own websites it has hurt consolidation (not necessarily a bad thing).

With China however, this isn't the case. The modern Internet was just kind of dumped on the country and it left almost all of the retailers without a presence. Alibaba however brilliantly came along and said "Hey, don't build your own sites, we have you covered both with merchant processing, marketing and distribution". With their unique ability to work within China they have capitalized big time. It's like you have Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, Target and all the clothing companies combined in to one company. Now while their strategy imo won't work well in the U.S., I think they can attack emerging markets in the same way. On the flip side, Amazon's approach for example isn't very conducive to these markets which is problematic to their overall growth.