Forget about the proverbial "slow boat to China." This week's news is all about traffic heading the other way ... fast ... and traveling by air.

A few days back, The Wall Street Journal described how the little-known Chinese business-to-business supplier Alibaba.com had acquired an almost entirely unknown shop here in the U.S., called Vendio Services. As headlines go, this wasn't much of a shell-shocker, and the Journal buried the story deep within the paper. (What little we've heard of Vendio here at the Fool appeared in a discussion of how eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) used it as a payment processor years ago.)

Vendio's apparently grown a bit since, evolving into a facilitator for merchants operating virtual stores on eBay and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN). Vendio describes its mission as providing merchants "an e-commerce solution that makes it easy to build and run your online e-commerce business no matter where your buyers shop."

Enter China
Now you may be wondering about the China connection. Well, about two months ago, I mentioned how UPS (NYSE: UPS) had allied with Alibaba's "AliExpress" subsidiary to set up a unified shipping and tracking system for the company's Chinese supplier-customers. At the time, AliExpress was promising to "eventually ... open to international suppliers as well," potentially taking Alibaba global in scope, and potentially vastly expanding business opportunities for UPS at the expense of archrival FedEx (NYSE: FDX).

Making it happen
What started as pipe dreams and happy talk has rapidly morphed into reality. With the acquisition of Vendio, Alibaba gains direct exposure to "more than 80,000 small U.S. businesses" that use Vendio. As Alibaba explains, these U.S. customers can now order products from AliExpress' catalog of 5 million-plus products, then turn around and sell these products to their own customers -- with UPS handling the logistics.

I have to say, it's pretty elegant. Alibaba already had the supplier network for manufacturing goods. Allying with UPS gave it a logistical supply chain for moving goods from sellers to buyers. With Vendio, Alibaba now has a direct link to the buyers themselves. Game, set, match.

Foolish final thought
A couple of weeks back, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz publicly promised shareholders that she would "figure out how to monetize" Yahoo!'s 40% stake in Alibaba's parent company. Seems to me, by allying with UPS and acquiring Vendio, the closer AliExpress gets to becoming the "Amazon.com" of the B2B set, the more salable it becomes -- and the closer Yahoo! gets to having an exit strategy.