I used to be an Alibaba customer way back when (mid 2000's). I came to see it as a place I could buy dang near anything in existence, be it trinkets for resale (which has made several US millionaires BTW) up to large scale industrial equipment. Literally, virtually anything. And a lot of it was quite inexpensive. Of course you had to buy in quantity. If I wanted insulated wire, I might need to buy several miles of it. The good news is that you could usually talk them into samples for evaluation for free, which was enough to feed my micro-manufacturing effort.
I have no idea what they have morphed into now, but they seem quite similar to Amazon. The nice thing about this is it would open up asian markets to American small business. And THAT is something new.