Bigcommerce has announced a partnership with the Chinese behemoth, hoping to slice into Amazon's capacity to source cheap products by connecting merchant to wholesaler.

Alibaba, which pulled off the biggest IPO in history on the New York Stock Exchange last month, will integrate its buyer and supplier network with Bigcommerce's users, enabling merchants to source products directly through Alibaba's suppliers.

"It's a cross-promo deal," said Bigcommerce founder Eddie Machaalani. "We're going to help our people within the Bigcommerce platform source products globally through Alibaba's platform, and they'll be promoting Bigcommerce to their merchants."

Bigcommerce is based in Sydney, with offices in Austin and San Francisco. The platform provides small to medium online retailers with tools to manage their growth, such as order processing, analytics, mobile commerce and marketing tools as well as frameworks to build online stores.

"This deal is designed to democratise components of e-commerce," said Mr Machaalani. "What companies like Amazon do really well is source products based on its buying power at an incredibly low cost and that pushes small businesses out of the market.

"We want all our businesses across the world to be able to leverage off Alibaba's platform to source products at a low cost as well."

There are now 55,000 merchants using Bigcommerce, including about 10,000 in Australia, and they have processed about $5 billion of sales.

"The e-commerce market in Australia is exploding," Mr Machaalani told Fairfax Media. "People here sell really savvy products, but the market is small overall."