The company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals, as well as electronic payment services, shopping search engines, and cloud computing services. It owns and operates a diverse portfolio of companies around the world in numerous business sectors.

Alibaba is one of the world's largest retailers and e-commerce companies. In 2020, it was also rated as the fifth-largest artificial intelligence company. It is also one of the biggest venture capital firms and investment corporations in the world, as well as the second largest financial services group behind Visa via its fintech arm Ant Group. The company hosts the largest B2B (Alibaba.com), C2C (Taobao), and B2C (Tmall) marketplaces in the world. It has been expanding into the media industry, with revenues rising by triple percentage points year after year. It also set the record on the 2018 edition of China's Singles' Day, the world's biggest online and offline shopping day.

On 19 September 2014, Alibaba's initial public offering (IPO) on New York Stock Exchange raised US$25 billion, giving the company a market value of US$231 billion and, by far, then the largest IPO in world history. According to analyst research report, Alipay, a third-party online payment platform of Alibaba, has the biggest market share in China with 300 million users and control of just under half of China's online payment market.

In the 2022 Forbes Global 2000, Alibaba Group was ranked as the 33rd largest public company in the world.

According to Wikipedia; Forbes