Lolli Responds to Alibaba's Partnership Denial
25 Nov 2019
Despite the fact that the news about newly-formed partnerships between cryptocurrency-related services and famous companies are emerging on a regular basis all over the industry, there is no guarantee that such collaborations would go seamlessly. One of the recent examples of failed partnerships is the situation that formed around Lolli, the up-and-coming decentralized application for online shopping, and Alibaba, the Chinese multinational conglomerate and an absolute behemoth of the retail industry that has the reported revenue of $56 billion this year alone. The feud began after Alibaba has publicly denied entering into any partnership agreements with the said cryptocurrency service. It didn’t take long for Lolli representatives to respond by saying that the partnership was absolutely legit, and the required services had been provided in full.
The backstory of the arising conflict
On the eve of the Singles’ Day, also known as Guanggun Jie, a Chinese shopping holiday for single people that takes place on November 11, Alex Adelman, the CEO of Lolli, announced that his company had entered a partnership with Alibaba, which stipulated for the provision of the 5% cashback paid in satoshis for purchases that were being made during the holiday. Apparently, this was meant to be a joint pilot project since the cashback option was made available only for the shoppers in the United States, while the residents of China and other countries were deprived of such an opportunity to earn free cryptocurrency for making purchases on AliExpress. It should be mentioned that all goods that people bought on that day had to be shipped directly from Alibaba’s warehouses in China.
However, a week after the holiday, the spokesperson of Alibaba had publicly denied any involvement with Lolli and said that the representative of the crypto company shouldn’t be going around telling people of any affiliations with the e-commerce platform or Alibaba Group in general.
Lolli’s response
It didn’t take long for Lolli to come up with a response to this situation. The CEO has made a statement, saying that his company and Alibaba had entered into a mutual agreement back in May. As per this agreement, Lolli was to become a vital part of the marketing campaign that must have climaxed on Singles’ Day. Adelman insisted that Lolli had performed their part of the deal diligently, having driven an enormous amount of traffic and revenue to the Chinese retail platform. He said that the team was flabbergasted by Alibaba’s sudden change of mind since they had done everything necessary to make this partnership work.
According to Adelman, he has had a prolonged communication via email with the representatives of Alibaba Group regarding all nuances of the agreement, and even offered the Chinese corporation a 24-hour trial period, so that they could have made sure that the application suits their marketing needs. Following that, both parties had entered into the agreement within the confines of which Lolli had to actively promote the Alibaba brand, carry out a marketing campaign through email and social media platforms. The CEO of Lolli suspects that the Chinese decided to back down after the news outlets began trumpeting about Alibaba starting to accept Bitcoin, which might have scared the alleged partners off.
