A B2B online media website got my attention recently. So I did a little research and here to share with you what I found out. Who is TradeKey? Here’s the introduction from TradeKey.com,

TradeKey.com was established in 2006 with the aim to facilitate global trade and bring buyers and sellers from all around the world to one common platform.

With a capital investment of US $20 Million – TradeKey.com is world’s leading marketplace which connects traders with worldwide wholesalers, buyers, importers & exporters, manufacturers and distributors in over 220 countries, quickly and cost effectively.

TradeKey.com is world’s first B2B marketplace that earned ISO 9001 Quality Management System and ISO 27001 Information Security System certifications to ensure maximum customer satisfaction, security and safe online trading for users.

TradeKey.com welcomes over 5 Million visitors with over 22 Million PageViews without fail every single month. These numbers corroborate with the veracity of the claim that TradeKey.com can give an extraordinary exposure to traders in the global market.

It shows a screen capture of its Google analytics account which shows TradeKey.com’s daily visit exceeds 150,000, which is probably true as you can see from the Google website trend graph:

And, this shows a  list of regions where visitors came from:

Is TradeKey better than Alibaba? Let me show you more findings. In terms of traffic levels, TradeKey is way lower than Alibaba which makes sense. China’s online B2B giant Alibaba now employs 17,000 people and plans to hire another 5000 this year.

A discussion thread at Alibaba forum talks about scamming issue on B2B platforms like TradeKey and Alibaba. A search on Google for “TradeKey scam” returns 6,210 results; but, “alibaba scam” returns 229,000 results. It seems the bad words about Alibaba is as many as its visitors.

There’s no obvious differentiators for TradeKey just like many other online B2B companies in China. It seems everybody is trying to catch every customers on every level. Trust is the key to success and building trust should be the top priority. Who does?

A close friend of mine from Zhejiang who is the owner of a manufacturing company told me he’s given up on online B2B media. He couldn’t get any serious buyers. Maybe that’s not the truth; but, that’s what many manufacturers understand.

Also read::About Alipay of Alibaba Group

China’s B2B media platform Toocle launched the first B2B top search list last week. The site is in four languages, Chinese, English, Korean, and Japanese. However, the top search list so far is only in Chinese.

Toocle top search list is based on data from six search engines: Baidu, Google, Yahoo, Sogou (Sohu), Tencent SoSo, Netease Youdao. To me, this top search list is not quite helpful. It only shows daily absolute number of searches on each of the six search engines and month to date percentage of market share (in terms of number of searches as shown below).

About Toocle

Toocle is a trading circle connecting sellers around one buyer. Being created by the buyer the seller can easily and freely join your toocle for the products you wish to sell. The platform enhances business communication and negotiation to conduct successful trading.

Also read::China Search Engine Report 2008 Advertisers and Users Behavior Study