He says he can also sell 300 to 500 items of clothing to individual buyers every day through the platform.

Fu said his company was not big enough to take it to the Canton Fair.

But even bigger companies including foreign buyers had shown a reluctance to pay the cost of the journey to Guangzhou this year.

The fair, which ended on Thursday, suffered a fall in the number of overseas purchasers of 9,126 to 165,436. Agreed export deals fell by US$5.32 billion to US$26.23 billion, fair spokesman Mu Xinhai told a news conference.

"Producers in the past paid $30,000 or more for a booth," said booth broker Zhang Zhaoxing. "I could easily make $10,000 in commission, almost enough for the whole year. This year I've only made a few hundred dollars because the cost of booths has fallen and people were reluctant to pay too much."

E-commerce still has a long way to go before it dominates the market. People have formed good working relations at Canton Fair, said Zhang, and the best market performers still exhibit there.

"You may say some companies have moved from Canton to Alibaba and similar online portals, but the deciding factor in major business deals is a face-to-face meeting," said Xiang Xiaoshan, an Alibaba business manager.

"Online business-to-business platforms do provide much more business opportunities but, paradoxically, people take much longer to decide and a deal because there is so much choice," said Xiang.

Beijing analyst Yu Ming said it appeared that Alibaba.com and the Canton Fair organizers were keen to co-exist peacefully. The fair organizers had in the past made unsuccessful attempts to operate it online.

"China has more than 34 million small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but only less than 11 million of them have engaged in e-commerce," said Wang Shutong, chief executive officer of major online business-to-business operator DHgate.com.

"The amount of export business completed online is only 4 percent of the entire exports by all the SMEs. Therefore e-commerce still has great potential in attracting new users."

(China Daily May 11, 2009)