Alibaba to set up international version of e-commerce marketplace Taobao

Jack Ma, the founder of China's Alibaba, said on Thursday the firm will set up an international version of its e-commerce marketplace Taobao to serve shoppers worldwide in multiple languages, including English and Chinese.Alibaba currently has an international e-commerce platform specializing in wholesale goods called Aliexpress, but does not have a similar offering for consumers to sell to each other.Ma made the comments on the sidelines of a meeting in China's eastern city of Hangzhou between China's Premier Li Keqiang and Chinese and foreign Internet industry leaders. The meeting coincided with the World Internet Conference, being held over three days in the town of Wuzhen.Earlier reports suggest that Alibaba Singles’ Day sales smashed records at $6 billion. The company said that more than $6 billion worth of goods were sold during its annual Singles’ Day online shopping frenzy, as customers jumped on heavily discounted goods to send sales surging past 2013’s record high. Chinese e-commerce rival JD.com said on its official Twitter account that orders in the first 10 hours of Singles’ Day had more than doubled compared with last year, up 140 percent.The “11.11 Shopping Festival”, which Alibaba says is the world’s biggest 24-hour online sale, began in 2009 when just 27 merchants on the company’s Tmall.com site offered deep discounts to boost sales during an otherwise slack period.With inputs from Reuters