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By Bloomberg

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is from today offering loans through LendingClub Corp. to help U.S. buyers source products from China and boost the e-commerce giant’s expansion overseas.

The program allows U.S. based businesses to apply for short-term credit lines of as much as $300,000 to purchase goods from Chinese suppliers on Alibaba.com, the Hangzhou-based company said in an e-mailed statement. The loans, which have terms of up to six months, carry fixed monthly interest rates of between 0.5 percent and 2.4 percent, according to the program’s website.

Alibaba is trying reach 2 billion individual customers and 10 million small businesses outside China as its e-commerce dominance at home limits growth potential, Chairman Jack Ma said last month. The expansion follows Alibaba’s record $25 billion initial public offering in September, which made the company more valuable than Amazon.com and EBay Inc. combined.

To assist new customers using its platforms, Alibaba will help vet suppliers and shipments, and transfer funds directly if buyers chose.

‘Efficient Financing’

“We want to make financing as efficient as possible for the millions of U.S. buyers that do business through Alibaba.com,” Michael Lee, Alibaba.com’s global marketing and business development director, said in the statement. “Our mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere.”

LendingClub, which started in 2007, was the first peer-to- peer, or marketplace, lender to go public last year. The San Francisco-based company arranges loans to individuals and small businesses over the Internet using funds from investors who can commit as little as $25.

Alibaba is already the top shopping site in Russia and Brazil, markets where it currently has no employees. AliExpress, an Alibaba site for users outside China, is the No. 1 shopping site in Russia, researcher TNS said in September.

Alibaba’s online payment system Alipay has 17.9 million active users overseas in more than 100 countries and is accepted by 2,000 merchants overseas, the company said in October.