The marketer of a major Korean car maker is facing a dilemma in China. Previously they closed a deal with the Beijing city government and have all the taxis driving in the capital city replaced with their vehicles. Now, they need a branding campaign to rebuild the product image because people in Beijing seem reluctant to buy a taxi-alike vehicle for their own use. The Korean car maker hit a niche market, but lost the mass interest.

Another dilemmatic situation happens to the Alibaba’s suppliers. The suppliers’ biggest worry might be while the leading B2B portal is expanding, the chance of being found by the buyers is getting competitive.

Well, I think the Global Sources’ suppliers also share the same concern. When Merle Hinrichs was announcing the new Global Sources 2.0 search feature last October, he only mentioned Global Sources ranked suppliers’ listing using its proprietary algorithm. But he didn’t explain how the proprietary algorithm worked. I guess the suppliers’ concern of being found and displayed in the first page versus the last page of the search result makes huge difference.

So, the suppliers’ decision of using Alibaba and Global Sources or other similar online sourcing portals’ services in theory will increase the chance to be found by the buyers, but then since all the portals are building their usability around search, competing within these proprietary search features can be a bit out of hand.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
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I am curious to know how these sourcing portals handle their suppliers’ list ranking. I try to find the answer from reading the FAQs and the help desk information of each portal website. Every information that I have come across is composed for buyers, mainly to illustrate how to narrow down the keywords or do the advance filtering for a better search result. Not much for the suppliers about how to be ranked.

About a year ago, I was involved in a small search engine project. My experience tells, it is a complex job to rank information which indeed requires a lot of algorithmic considerations. I also know the difference between a true algorithmic indexing mechanism versus a generic database full text and field indexing.

The latter can some time be too simple or otherwise, too loose for human manipulation which interferes the fairness of the result. We can’t simply sort all the information alphanumerically or chronologically. And how the 3rd party certified information will affect the ranking of a relevant product specification, how relevancy should be built? There is a clear difference between sorting and ranking. All these technical works are never easy.

Now all the marketers of the B2B portals are using buyers as the bait to reach the prospects. But I believe sooner or later the marketers will face a challenge. Because on one hand the product is evolving into very search-centric, on the other hand, it needs to answer the suppliers’ dilemma: Your customers all want to be found but how they will be found.

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