It depends on your perspective.

1688 and Taobao have different positioning. 1688 is aimed at retail merchants, while packages are directly aimed at customers. Maybe Mr. Ma's vision at the beginning was to take over everything from suppliers to end consumers, and then designed this structure into two layers, and these two platforms were born.

But the actual situation is not like this. Mr. Ma's thinking is still too simple and idealistic, because consumers want benefits, merchants want to promote sales regardless of who the buyers are, and the distribution models of different products are different, which ultimately leads to an awkward positioning of 1688. Individual consumers want to be cheap, and merchants have to maintain the posture of wholesalers, which makes no one satisfied.

So no matter how you look at it, 1688 can be said to be unreliable.