Last week, the e-commerce site Alibaba made headlines in Canada when it sold 90,000 Nova Scotia lobsters from a single operator in one day. The company that made the sale, ZF Max International, was described as a “Canadian-based operation with a parent company in China. ZF Max employs up to 60 Nova Scotians and runs a lobster plant near Halifax.” In other words, those Canadian lobsters are being sold to Chinese consumers by a Chinese company over a Chinese website.

You may have never heard of it, but the Alibaba Group is the world’s largest online retailer. Taking advantage of the country’s growing middle class, Alibaba sites account for 80 percent of China’s online sales, racking up $248 billion in sales last year, which is more than the United States’ two biggest retailers, ebay and Amazon, combined.

It’s big business, and a market as big as China can dominate. The problem is that if all of a sudden that market is shut off, it can be difficult to make up the difference in domestic markets that may have been neglected. This is what happened when China boycotted geoducks earlier this year: Fishermen, divers, growers and dealers in the Northwest suffered heavy losses.

I’ve covered other fisheries, like Maine elvers (or glass eels), that depend on overseas markets. A couple years ago, prices peaked at around $2,500 per pound for these tiny glass eels to help stock Asian eel farms whose global supply was limited by conservation measures on glass eels taken around the world. That spiked prices, and helped create a contentious fishery of Maine fishermen fighting over who gets to put their net where, and, later, who gets a share of the quota.

With such a prized catch, fishermen should have had control of the market. Instead, they had almost no idea about where the elvers were going. I visited a seafood dealer in Pembroke, Maine, in the spring of 2013, and happened to be there when Asian exporters Jason and Kevin (last names were not provided) of American Elver Depot in Flushing, N.Y., came to weigh, package and ship the tiny elvers to China. I tried to find out more about where they were going, but neither Jason nor Kevin would speak to me, and I was hung up on when I tried calling the company (read more about the global elver trade here).

Why so secretive? Could Maine fishermen, if better organized, have demanded much more than what they were getting?

I understand the positive side of the Alibaba story. Creating new markets for seafood should help to increase demand and provide diversity so that when one market is weak, another one will (hopefully) help make up the difference and keep dock prices healthy. We should be figuring out ways to make the most of those new markets, rather than letting them make the most of us.