Chinese B2B e-commerce company Alibaba.com has announced that its new online wholesale website, 1688.com, was formally launched on March 9, 2010, and the wholesale traffic reached a whopping 6.39 million people on the first day.

Integrated with Alibaba's former Chinese website Alibaba.com.cn, 1688.com is a newly upgraded platform that aims to be the world's largest online wholesale market. Products available on the website reportedly cover over 6,000 industries, including apparel, small commodities, hardware, and machinery. It provides more than 500,000 quality suppliers and over 150 million pieces of product information. It also teams with Alibaba Group's other subsidiaries, including Taobao.com and Alipay.com, to realize coordinated operations in the e-commerce industry chain.

Wu Huating, Alibaba's senior director for the Chinese market, said that 1688.com is positioned as the world's largest online purchase and wholesale market, which will introduce a large number of buyers to factories, brand vendors, and first-tier wholesalers. These buyers include vendors on Taobao.com, owners of offline stores in different cities, and current buyers who purchase goods from entity wholesale markets.

Wei Zhe, CEO of Alibaba, told local media that 1688.com will work with authoritative Chinese organizations to establishment a new Internet credit and security system to make sure that any trade dispute on 1688.com can be solved effectively in the future.