A pledge by Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., to create American jobs by selling U.S. goods through his e-commerce platforms comes weeks after Washington’s trade adviser identified the Chinese company as undermining U.S. industry by failing to stamp out sales of fake goods.

During a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in New York on Monday, Mr. Ma discussed efforts to add a million U.S. businesses to Alibaba’s online-shopping platforms. He praised Mr. Trump as “very smart, very open-minded” and said he wanted to improve trade and relations between the U.S. and China. Mr. Trump said the two men had a “great meeting” and that “Jack and I are going to do great things.”

The meeting brought together Mr. Trump and an entrepreneur who embodies much of what the president-elect criticized in the U.S. election campaign, when he repeatedly excoriated China for stealing American manufacturing jobs.

Mr. Ma’s outreach to Mr. Trump coincides with concerns among U.S. regulators and policy makers about Alibaba’s operations. The company dominates online shopping in China through its various marketplaces, and analysts estimate its annual merchandise volume is larger than that of eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. combined.

In December, the U.S. Trade Representative put Alibaba’s largest shopping platform back on a list of marketplaces linked to “significant infringement of American businesses’ intellectual property rights,” saying that tens of millions of U.S. jobs and several trillion dollars of economic growth depend on this intellectual property.