Meh, I buy stuff from alibaba from europe, cheap stuff like e15 worth of usb connectors. They seem to manage just fine shipping, for free too, thanks to subsidized china mail. For those low amounts they don't even bother with returns; most are so afraid of bad ratings/open disputes that they'll ship another batch the moment you voice a complaint.
Not saying I disagree with you I guess, it's also about westerners finding alibaba a bit too exotic (and dangerous), but once you get used to the asian style shopping, it's fine.
I've spent 15 years buying stuff off amazon.com (coming from California), and have recently moved to Singapore. The closest version of Amazon (with *insanely good local shipping - sometimes same day by bike courier) is http://www.qoo10.sg. I've been fully satisfied with prices, and delivery on everything there - but, it's still a bit of a culture shock for your average western shopper.
We'll see if I still feel the same way a year from now - but (even ignoring the discovery issue) I can imagine how having Amazon provide an interface for my purchases would have made this way more seamless.
I'm talking from the perspective of the seller and of course I can only talk about our experience. Again, shoes (high priced too) are probably very different from cheap USB connectors. And having to ship a pair of 200,- € shoes back and forth from europe to the USA until the customers found the correct size is not worth the effort in our opinion. It's hard to find a proper return service - you can't leave that task to the customer; if proper export documents are missing we have to collect the return package from the customs. It's a mess.
And if you ship larger amounts you have to register the export with the customs office, which is another complicated process, filling endless forms in some mandatory Java applet system.
Amazon getting rid of all of this for a reasonable price would be very welcome.
Not saying I disagree with you I guess, it's also about westerners finding alibaba a bit too exotic (and dangerous), but once you get used to the asian style shopping, it's fine.