Why Are Alibaba International Inquiries Getting Pricier and Flimsier?

Bottom line｜Alibaba inquiries getting pricier and flimsier is usually not a matter of operational skill — it’s the inevitable result of the platform’s business model, which profits by making suppliers fight over the same buyers’ exposure. Organic traffic tightens year after year, pushing factories toward RFQs where a crowd of competitors underbid one another. One building-materials factory we diagnosed spends around 300,000 RMB a year on Alibaba, with organic inquiries down to almost nothing. The real way out rarely lies in running Alibaba better — it lies in whether a factory has a lead-generation system of its own.

Among factories that export building materials, the past couple of years have produced a shared feeling: on Alibaba International, the spending hasn’t dropped but the orders haven’t grown. Open the inquiries and eight in ten are just fishing for a price; the other two ask for a catalog and vanish. Many owners chalk this up to their own operations falling short — but take the whole thing apart, and the root of the problem sits somewhere else. We’ve diagnosed plenty of these building-materials factories, and my read is blunt: this one isn’t on the operations team.

An account that keeps getting harder to justify

Lay out the numbers for a typical building-materials exporter. Genuinely working Alibaba International costs roughly 300,000 RMB a year: about 100,000 for Gold Supplier membership and about 200,000 for P4P ads. A supplier doing reasonably well closes around 40,000 USD a month. That return on spend is steadily getting worse.

What deserves more attention is the disappearance of organic inquiries. The traffic that 300,000 RMB now buys comes mainly from chasing thirty or forty RFQs a month — the kind of lead where one buyer broadcasts a request and a crowd of suppliers scrambles to quote. In other words, the money no longer buys “growing the business”; it buys “not going dark.”

The mechanism was never built to favor suppliers

This experience isn’t a glitch in some step of the process — it’s the inevitable outcome of how the platform makes money: Alibaba profits from suppliers competing over the same pool of buyers. It does three things in particular.

First, it tightens organic traffic year over year. A few years ago, stacking enough products and keywords was enough to draw inquiries; today, without P4P spend and RFQ chasing, a supplier is barely visible. The traffic switch sits in the platform’s hands, not the factory’s.

Second, it manufactures price comparison. An RFQ, by design, is one buyer spraying a request across ten suppliers — the whole point is to drive them against each other on price. The price-only inquiries that ask once and leave aren’t bad luck; they’re what this mechanism produces in bulk.

Third, it keeps the customer on the platform’s side. For deals closed on Alibaba, the contact details, behavioral data, and reviews all live on the platform. One rule change, and years of accumulated ground can vanish overnight.

More budget won’t buy the way back

Faced with declining traffic, most factories’ first instinct is to pour in more ad budget. But that road narrows the further it goes — what the money buys is always “seen once,” never “this customer is now yours.” Stop spending and the flow stops; no flow, no orders; so the spending continues. It’s a loop that tightens with every turn, and it’s why leaning on a platform alone falls short: rented traffic leaves nothing behind once the rent stops. Sooner or later a factory needs an independent site and lead-generation base of its own.

To be fair, Alibaba isn’t useless. For a factory just starting out — still testing whether overseas demand exists at all — it’s the least-effort proving ground: a place to train the team, handle English inquiries, and get a feel for how quoting works. My point was never “drop Alibaba.” It’s this: don’t treat it as your only growth engine. Those are two very different things.

The real problem often isn’t Alibaba at all

Diagnosing factories like these, the most common finding is that the real weakness isn’t Alibaba operations — it’s that the factory has no lead-generation system to begin with. Blunt version: of the factories like this I’ve seen, eight in ten didn’t lose on product — they never planned to leave the price-only arena in the first place.

Plenty of factories run export in a way that is, at bottom, a lottery: open an Alibaba account, list the products, and wait for buyers to show up; a win is luck. There’s no channel of their own and no way of explaining the factory clearly. Even when a buyer does turn up, a salesperson facing a stranger overseas struggles to make the case for why this factory is worth an order.

Meanwhile, how overseas buyers search has already shifted — more and more of them vet suppliers through search and AI first. Fail to make the case there, and the factory may as well not exist. For a factory without a standout product or category leadership, the odds on a platform alone were never high, and the platform only magnifies that gap. And the overseas buyers willing to pay thirty percent more for a reliable factory are exactly the ones lottery-style export can never reach.

Before renewing, find out where the money is leaking

Whether to renew Alibaba next year, whether to add P4P — those are questions for later. The one worth answering first is different: is that money leaking on Alibaba operations, or on the fact that the factory has no lead-generation and conversion system of its own? These are two different ailments, and the treatment is nothing alike.

Rather than betting on another year, it’s worth walking the current lead-generation path end to end first — finding where it leaks and where nothing has been built yet. Once that’s clear, deciding where the money goes stops being a gamble.

By Rocky Dou, founder of DigitaliBrand, focused on diagnostics and consulting for B2B factories going global. These numbers and pitfalls come from real money we’ve walked through alongside a batch of factories, not conclusions pulled from a report. (LinkedIn / Zhihu / WeChat Channels in the site footer.)