As a paid member on Alibaba, we are subjected to Alibaba’s rules.

Earlier this month, Sep. 2020, Alibaba introduced a new stars label on suppliers’ profiles, which is called Supplier Online Performance Index, SOPI for short. It is from 1 star to 5 stars. To understand this new concept, we will need to explain what they used to do. Before Sep, when you look at sellers’ profiles, you will see a star system, called Transaction level. The more stars they have, the more payment they have received through Alibaba financial system.  This index included the data from the 1st day they became Alibaba members(or since trade assurance was introduced on Alibaba, whichever is late)

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Now here is the difference between this new practice, SOPI and the old practice, transaction level.

SOPI includes transaction level and another 3 aspects, known as presentation quality, product popularity and service quality. The lowest score from these 4 aspects will be the final score of SOPI. It sounds quite all right, where is the catch? It is this “product popularity”, it has very little to do with buyers’ preference(Alibaba claims it does, but it barely does). The sellers have to invest heavily on its P4P program, pay for performance, in order to have a better SPOI score. If they don’t pay for it, no matter how well they do on the other 3 aspects, they will never have a good score. This SOPI will mislead buyers and make them believe whoever pay more to Alibaba are better suppliers to them. That is not the truth.

Let me explain it further by this following example:

Supplier A: it has been Alibaba paid member for 5 years, and have a total transaction more than 2 million USD totally. It doesn’t invest on P4P program. It has only one star, or even no star.

Supplier B: it is a new member, transaction level is about 50,000 USD; it invests heavily on P4P. It will have at least 2 stars.

According to this new concept SOPI, to buyers, supplier B is a much better choice than A. But is it?

To sum up, SOPI is good for Alibaba itself(at least temporarily), and some new and well funded suppliers. It misleads buyers and it pushes a lot of factories who don’t have a big online promoting budget into the corner.

Barry Liu

Foshan LZ Building Materials LTD.