SAN FRANCISCO — Alibaba Group, the king of e-commerce in China, is dangling a deal that could turn into one of the biggest IPOs in history.

In a long-awaited move Tuesday, Alibaba filed for an initial public offering of stock in the U.S. that could surpass the $16 billion Facebook and its early investors raised in the social networking company’s IPO two years ago.

Alibaba’s paperwork says it will raise at least $1 billion, but finance professionals believe that is a notional figure to get the IPO process rolling and say the Chinese company’s ambitions for the share sale are much richer.

“This is going to be the granddaddy of all IPOs,” predicted Sam Hamedah, CEO of PrivCo, which researches privately held corporations.

Although it’s not well-known in the United States, Alibaba is an e-commerce powerhouse that makes more money than Amazon.com and eBay combined. It has helped drive the rise of e-commerce in China, a transformation that has given millions of households greater access to clothes, books and consumer electronics in a society that in the 1980s still required ration tickets for some supermarket items.

Shopping online has become even more popular as smartphones give more Chinese easy access to a computer. Alibaba’s launch of an online payment system, Alipay, filled the gap for the shoppers who lacked credit cards. Still growing at an explosive rate, online shopping is forecast by consulting firm McKinsey to triple from 2011 levels to $400 billion a year by 2015.