Dear Alibabans,

Here in this forum, and in many others outside of Alibaba, the common fault of your company presentation, product introduction or mass mailer, is the inability to write the message in proper English.

This is true amongst Asian countries, like South Korea, Japan and China, but is also found in the writings of people in the other countries which are not familiar with the language, and whose national language is not English.

The common mistakes made (some of them are also made by the English speaking people):

1.   Spelling mistakes.
2. WRITING IN UPPPERCASE throughout the entire text, which means you are SHOUTING!.
3. Improper Salutations, and Pidgin language. E.g. Hi Mr. So and So, are you good? Chinese salutation, or Asalamulailikum - Arabic salutation.
4. Use of acroynyms, without explanations. E.g. MR-16, PIE, AYE, PUB, ISO, etc.
5. Wrong word used in the context. E.g. Congratulations for purchasing our product ....... 
6. Use of idioms which is only familiar by a particular group of people - E.g. "Green hand - I am a green hand in e-Commerce."
7. Structure of the letter is not in proper order, and there is no closing.
   

For 1, spelling mistakes, Alibaba Engineers placed Spell-check in the forum boards, and all Red underlined words fail the spell check. You have choice of using the Dictionary of either British English or American English.
No. 2 will be rather easy to change, always remember to unlock your CapsLock key.
No. 3 also has to be incalcated into the habits of the writers.
The rest from 4 to 7 would be quite difficult, and will take longer time to adapt. However when corresponding with people of English-speaking nationals, they can easily forgive you when you do these writings. But if you are writing manuals, or presentation of your company profile, it has to be better, and without these mistakes.

Street Smart

 Let us start by picking up some samples, and work along this.  We must stress that this is not to shame the other party, but just a matter of reference for all of us to learn.

Sample of profile by a Lighting company:

We are the one and origanal mfg. Of the lazys mans light. The lazy mans light is for indoors or outdoors of any home or business. We are looking for dist. World wide to join in on this money making lighting system that has the west cost of califorina at awe and o!

Notice of spelling mistakes on words: origanal and o.
words like: mfg. and dist. are forbidden in company writeups. spell the words in full: distributors and manufacturer.

The word lazy is not a noun, an adjective and does not come in plural.
This sentence : The lazy mans light is for indoors or outdoors of any home or business. - like talking down on the man (the plural of man is men), which puts your product in a bad light.
Grammatic mistake: World wide to join in on this money making lighting system that has the west cost of califorina at awe and o!
should be written as: We are looking for companies to join our world-wide distribution of this profitable lighting system, that has awed the West Coast of California.
 
Street

Let us look at an email advertiser below:

Dear Mr. Hong, (Street Smart )

This is Bruce from Alibaba. In my previous email, I have introduced Alibaba Gold Supplier (international edition) service in General. This is the second email on service details.

1.First-level Priority Listing : For example: Suppose you were a buyer for Bamboo prodicts, you type fence to search on alibaba ,pls click here. Gold Suppliers have chance to be listed on the first page. That means: Gold Suppliers stand out among there 13,569 competitors. Thus in return generate 22x* more inquiries and better return-on-investment.

2.Exclusive Access to Buying Leads: We have many buyers who prefer to posting buying leads,pls see here.You may notice ¡±This member would like to receive quotations from paid members only. " everywhere at our site. 85% buyers at our site only do business with our paid members for safe trading and self-protection; 100% buyers make Gold Supplier as their first choice. As a Gold Supplier,you are proven legal and safe, you can contact with all members on Alibaba. Moreover, you may also see:"This buyer would like not to disclose his contact information. " That means: this buyer posted this information less than 7 days ago, and only paid members can contact with these fresh inquiries in the fist 7 days.

Time is money,by studies, 83% companies choose suppliers in the first week after posting buying offers. Renew your membership, to be success on Alibaba now.   see if you can

Bruce
Global Sales Department

This is from Alibaba Sales Team, see if you can spot some common mistakes and can give your best shot of advices.

Street Smart

First, I want to correct the Chinese notion that all family names are in the first name. E.g. Hong Shan ONG. The family name is always the last name as in Western culture and English speaking culture. ONG is the family name, and address should be : Mr. ONG. However, you can be informal in your address if you are familiar with addressee, and slap him on the shoulder and call him Dear Hongshan, without the Mr.

Introduction of all Alibaba staff emails: "This is Bruce from Alibaba." .... this is typical Chinese letter writing, which is not done in Western culture, some even went to say like Chinese, You good? (Ni hao?) Small name "cow" (Xiao ming niu). No, you have to write as a company, not an individual, and there is no need to write your name and say where you are from. The bottom of your email already tells who you are and where you are from.

On the first introductory paragraph, the email mentioned "previous email" and this as "second email", all presuming that the receiver has read the previous mail, which puts a lot of pressure on the reader to recollect what the previous email is about, and has he read it? All these unecessary pressure becomes annoying to the reader.

....... to continue on the other paragraphs.

Let's look at the Body of the letter.

".First-level Priority Listing : For example: Suppose you were a buyer for Bamboo prodicts, you type fence to search on alibaba ,pls click here. Gold Suppliers have chance to be listed on the first page. That means: Gold Suppliers stand out among there 13,569 competitors. Thus in return generate 22x* more inquiries and better return-on-investment."

Sudden approach to the benefits of the product, without any pre-phrase. Confuses the reading of the text on a break in the continuity or flow of thoughts. So, there are also other Gold Suppliers sharing the first-level priority listing, at top of the page, and some of them are actually competitors offering the same product. This statement "Gold Suppliers stand out among there 13,569 competitors." .... the customer will not buy. with grammatical mistake on the word there, and you are most propably using the FREE MEMBER list as reference to the competitors, not the other Gold Suppliers. People are more informed now, and you MUST state honest facts and no exergerations or unrelated facts, assuming that all Free members are competitors. The next thought in the customer's mind would be ... "so what?"

Finally, the sentence, "Thus in return generate 22x* more inquiries and better return-on-investment." I see an asterisk next to the 22x and started searching for the explanatory note which all asterisk meant to be, but becomes frustrated when I cannot find any. Ask myself, am I so stupid? What this Bruce is trying to say is the return will be twenty-two times more inquiries than a free member. But without any evidence or proof, and so what is the real benefit? More inquiries, or more sales?

..................... to continue later

Point 2 of body.

Quote:

2.Exclusive Access to Buying Leads: We have many buyers who prefer to posting buying leads,pls see here.You may notice ¡±This member would like to receive quotations from paid members only. " everywhere at our site. 85% buyers at our site only do business with our paid members for safe trading and self-protection; 100% buyers make Gold Supplier as their first choice. As a Gold Supplier,you are proven legal and safe, you can contact with all members on Alibaba. Moreover, you may also see:"This buyer would like not to disclose his contact information. " That means: this buyer posted this information less than 7 days ago, and only paid members can contact with these fresh inquiries in the fist 7 days.

Unquote//

The sentence is not true, "As a Gold Supplier, you are proven legal and safe, you can contact with all members on Alibaba."
As we come across so many scam cases by Gold Supplier with a history of scams, proven authentic cannot prove a member as being safe, but at least you know who took your money, if you were scammed by Gold Member. You don't even know who is behind the Free Members - that is for sure.

Not sure what the opening sentence means, by exclusive access to Buying Leads. There are lots and lots of sellers cramping the Buying Leads, all of them trying to make their sales pitch, and most of them are not relevant to your type of business, some competitors trying to find out your price and some are scammers. They are mostly a bunch of time suckers.
However there is still a very small number of genuine seekers of your product or services.

Deepak