By the Numbers: Amazon vs. Alibaba (Infographic) As Amazon prepares to celebrate its 20th birthday, here's a look at how it stacks up against the Chinese ecommerce giant.

By Catherine Clifford Jul 13, 2015

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Amazon may be the biggest and busiest ecommerce company in the U.S., but China's Alibaba delivers way more packages.

According to an infographic compiled by international courier ParcelHero, while Amazon ships 3 million packages a day, Alibaba ships 12 million. Another interesting factoid: On Cyber Monday, America's great ecommerce shopping day, Amazon processed 37 million orders. On Singles Day, an annual shopping holiday in China created by Alibaba itself, Alibaba processed 278 million orders.

Alibaba, of course, has a much larger customer base: There are about 1.4 billion people living in China, compared to 319 million in the U.S.

As Amazon closes in on its 20th birthday, which it plans to celebrate on July 15 with a slew of Black Friday-style deals, ParcelHero founder Roger Sumner-Rivers says the tech giant's future is in truly developing its own infrastructure for package delivery.

"Amazon's ultimate aim for its new distribution arm, Amazon Logistics, is, we believe, that it becomes a logistics company in its own right, competing with companies such as UPS and FedEx," he said in a statement accompanying an industry report on Amazon.

As Amazon is busy building its own delivery logistics network, so too is Alibaba. Called the China Smart Logistics Network, the operation aims to deliver shipments to any city in China within 24 hours, according to ParcelHero. It's slated for completion in eight to 10 years.

For both Alibaba and Amazon, delivering packages is only one part of multi-pronged business models, and so while Alibaba delivers more packages than Amazon, Amazon is the larger company by revenue. Last year, Jeff Bezos' company raked in almost $89 billion in sales and Jack Ma's ecommerce platform took in a bit over $12 billion.

Have a look at the infographic below for a more in depth look at the Amazon-Alibaba faceoff.

Click to Enlarge+

Catherine Clifford

Senior Entrepreneurship Writer at CNBC

Catherine Clifford is senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC. She was formerly a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com, the small business reporter at CNNMoney and an assistant in the New York bureau for CNN. Clifford attended Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can follow her on Twitter at @CatClifford.

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