What Is Alibaba Multispecialty Supplier? What Does It Mean to You?
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What Is Alibaba’s Multispecialty Supplier?
Multispecialty Supplier is a term created by Alibaba, which is equivalent to “competitive trading company”, meaning a company that can provide buyers with low MOQ, light customization, door-to-door logistics, and carries a wide range of relevant product categories.
Multispecialty Supplier is one of the three types of suppliers under Alibaba’s verified supplier program, which first appeared on alibaba.com in May 2024.
Need help verifying suppliers?
Fami Sourcing verifies whether your candidate suppliers are legitimate and reliable through 106 criteria, and of course lets you know if they are real factories or just middlemen.
I Need Help Verifying SuppliersFind Out How We Verify SuppliersWhat Does the Multispecialty Supplier of Alibaba Really Mean to You?
You can find the definition of Multispecialty Supplier on Alibaba’s official blog. Still, it’s hard to get a sense of what this actually means to you, which is why I decided to share some facts about Multispecialty Supplier.
Fact #1: Multispecialty Suppliers Are Middlemen
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that you could equate “Multispecialty Suppliers” with “trading companies”. However, Alibaba’s official description does not say so.
Is this just our unconfirmed speculation? Nope, we found the answer in a Chinese press release.
In an online conference held in August 2024, Zhang Kuo, President of Alibaba.com International, described Multispecialty Supplier as follows:
We have divided the platform merchants into three categories.
The third category is business people who capture global business opportunities and are not good at manufacturing but can organize capacity to seize opportunities quickly.
They are called multispecialty suppliers, and these traders are very important to buyers and can provide complete solutions.
Zhang Kuo
President of Alibaba.com International
Fact #2: Multispecialty Suppliers Are Verified Suppliers on Alibaba
There are two types of supplier memberships on alibaba.com, gold suppliers and verified suppliers.
Multispecialty Supplier is a verified supplier.
Based on the fact that Multispecialty Supplier is a trading company, how is the trading company with Alibaba gold supplier membership displayed in the company information?
It will be shown as a trading company or manufacturer (Yes, some trading companies will be shown as manufacturers on Alibaba, remember that the gold supplier’s company information is filled in by the supplier themselves, without verification)
Fact #3: Quotes From Multispecialty Suppliers Are Usually More Expensive
Multispecialty Supplier as a trading company does not have the price competitive advantage of a factory, and they need to pay a high annual membership fee in order to become a verified supplier of Alibaba.
Alibaba verified supplier membership is $12,000 per year, however in order to get more leads, suppliers spend an average of $46,000 on alibaba.com.
According to our first-hand sourcing experience, multispecialty supplier’s quotes on Alibaba are usually 3% to 8% more expensive than trading companies as GOLD supplier.
Why Did Alibaba Create the Term “Multispecialty Supplier” Instead of Just Saying “Trading Company”?
For buyers, “Trading Company” is more straightforward to understand than “Multispecialty Supplier”.
However, from Alibaba Group’s recent earnings report, we seem to see what motivates them to make these changes.
From a wholesale site displaying supplier information in 1999, Alibaba today has features such as Trade Assurance and Ready-To-Ship (RTS). These new features allow Alibaba to meet buyers’ needs while generating profits for the group.
However, Alibaba avoids directly telling buyers who is a trading company and who is a real factory; if they wanted to do so, a simple filtering feature would do the trick.
Why? Because Alibaba wants to retain a large number of trading company customers, who are the primary source of revenue supporting the platform.
This is the fundamental reason why buyers can’t easily find real factories on Alibaba and why Alibaba created the term “Multispecialty Supplier” instead of just saying “Trading Company”.