Alizila
Client:
Alibaba
Date:
January 2016
Agency:
Group SJR
Services:
Development | Project Management
About Client
Alibaba is China's — and by some measures, the world's — biggest online commerce company. Its three main sites — Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com — have hundreds of millions of users, and host millions of merchants and businesses. Alibaba handles more business than any other e-commerce company in the world.
Project Goals
Alizila is the news hub for Alibaba Group. The focus of the this website is coverage of Alibaba corporate and business unit news, the digital economy and e-commerce industry, and China-specific insights. The site features the latest news about the company, its corporate history, and business trends in the e-commerce market.
Videos are a huge part are a huge part of Alizila's online presence and Alizila was built to incorporate not only YouTube videos, but also Ooyala, which is a private video hosting solution. These videos are incorporated throughout the site to give users plenty to keep them entertained.
Creative Solutions
Alizila is primarily meant as a news hub for US/European readers, but still needs to be able to be accessible by the Chinese market. This presented some unique challenges because of China's "Great Firewall". YouTube is banned within China, so we utilized a video platform called Ooyala to serve up videos since videos work well around the globe on their platform. Ooyala worked well overall, but we often encountered caching issues within China and troubleshooting them became quite difficult. Working with the Chinese-based Alibaba team to QA and troubleshoot video issues often involved late-night and early-morning meetings, but in the end the video platform preformed very well.
The other hurdle to overcome with Alizila revolved around Alibaba's annual event known as 11/11 (also known as Single's Day), which is the largest shopping day of the year in China (similar to Black Friday in the U.S.). We spent countless hours refining the caching on the site to ensure the site loaded extremely quickly and also that videos played with very little buffer. The site handled the traffic from the 2017 11/11 event like a champ and the client was very happy with the performance.
