CRT Extra: More on New Taobao “Mall” Site

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/11/02/crt-extra-more-on-new-taobao-mall-site/
A plan to re-brand and expand the business-to-consumer platform of Alibaba Group’s online retail platform Taobao.com could lead to higher profits for the company (see yesterday’s story in The Wall Street Journal here ).

Tmall.com

Taobao is re-branding its B2C platform Taobao Mall, giving it an independent web address, Tmall.com, and spending $30 million in an advertising campaign to attract more users. The move is meant to differentiate listings by Taobao Mall merchants, who are either brand owners or authorized distributors, from Taobao.com’s consumer-to-consumer, or C2C, merchants, who are mostly individuals or small to medium sized businesses that don’t have to go through the same verification process to open a store on Taobao’s platforms.
Daniel Zhang, Taobao’s CFO, said at a press conference on Monday that the company intends to launch more sales categories, such as a category for groceries, and to create unique features for each category, like a price guarantee for air tickets.
Taobao Mall currently has more than 20,000 merchants who sell products from more than 30,000 brands, Zhang said.
Expanding the Taobao Mall product could translate to higher profits for Taobao, which charges fees to B2C merchants for listings while allowing C2C merchants to list products for free (revenue on C2C listings comes from advertising and additional services value added services–see below). Taobao’s free listings have made it difficult for other companies including eBay to compete in the Chinese C2C market.
With Taobao Mall expanding rapidly (the company expects to quadruple its transaction value this year), Zhang said fees will be one of four main sources of income for the company going forward. The others: Keyword advertisements so merchants can advertise their listing when users search for related products, other types of advertising, and value-added services such as aiding merchants with warehousing and other logistics issues.
So far, Adidas, Lenovo, Uniqlo, and Procter and Gamble products are all sold in Taobao Mall.
Zhang reiterated that the company has no plans for an initial public offering, and told reporters during an interview that the new plans for Taobao Mall are not an indication of any plans for a listing.
– Loretta Chao. Follow her on Twitter @lorettac

http://lz.taobao.com data manangement tool

How has Taobao.com grown so rapidly?

By TONY JIN
Published: January 29, 2008 01:00 AM

 

source from: http://thechinaperspective.com/articles/howhastaobaocomgrownsorapidly3539/index.html

 

Turnover at Taobao.com grew 156% to US$5.98 billion last year, putting it ahead of all major retailers bar Bailian Group. Yang Guoqiang of the China Business News takes a look at the growth of China’s most popular online shop, and the challenges ahead

Can Taobao.com, China’s most popular online shop, outsell domestic retailers like Bailian Group and global giants like Wal-Mart, or even the entire traditional merchandising sector? We do not have an answer. But one thing for certain is that Taobao needs to improve its quality control and logistics systems and build its credibility.

According to Taobao, online throughput rocketed 156% last year to US$5.98 billion (RMB43.3 billion), putting it ahead of domestic competitors VanGuard (RMB37.9 billion in turnover) and Dashang Group (RMB36.1 billion) and its biggest foreign competitor, Carefour (RMB24.8 billion). Its turnover was second only to Bailian Group’s RMB77.1 billion.

Taobao’s rapid success began just five years ago, since when its sales have expanded at least 100% a year, well above the 15% increase in sales throughout China’s retail sector and the 40% annual gain posted by large retailers in China. Taobao estimates that China’s online spending totaled US$8.16 billion (RMB59 billion) last year.

According to Taobao, the company took just five years to reach a point (RMB40 billion in turnover) that took Wal-Mart 29 years. However, Yu Yang, the president of Analysys, a leading Internet-focused business consultancy, disagreed with Taobao’s 4-versus-29 claim, claiming the trend towards online shopping made comparison with a store-based retailer meaningless.

“They are doing business with two totally different modes,” he said. “Wal-Mart does all the things itself, including sourcing and distributing. It even has its own plants. But Taobao is just a distributor.

“From a market perspective, Taobao’s turnover is collective while Wal-Mart’s is individual,” he added. “Wal-Mart represents the highest level of the retail sector whereas Taobao represents the newly emerging online shopping sector.”

Taobao is, however, still stacking up well with store-based retailers, as a comparison with cosmetics giant Avon shows. Avon collected RMB1.7 billion in revenues last year from its 7,000-plus stores across China, far lower than Taobao’s RMB2.6 billion collected from cosmetics.

Taobao’s revenue from nursery products surged 361.5% year-on-year to RMB1.2 billion in 2007; revenue from SIM card and recharge card sales surged 427.7% to RMB1.76 billion; revenue from clothing surged 970% to RMB5.78 billion, more than the revenues from clothing sales in all shopping malls in Beijing combined.

Taobao.com is also becoming increasingly attractive to the white collar community. Statistics show nearly nine million people visit the website everyday. Super centers in China, like those owned by Wal-Mart and Carefour have 15,000 visitors on average everyday, meaning it takes 600 large supermarkets to match the number of visitors to Taobao.com. At the end of 2006, there were just 600 large foreign-owned retailers in China.

The red hot website had 53 million registered users as at the end of 2007, up 76.7% on 2006, 24.4 percentage points higher than the 53.3% increase last year in China’s online population.

However, for e-commerce, creditability, logistics, security and tax collection remain a problem. Beijing introduced a rule on May 30 2007 requiring vendors to have a license in order to sell their merchandises online. But the rule only applies to small and medium sized firms and is not applicable to big websites like Taobao and eBay.

Taobao is currently diversifying its revenue sources as it looks to stop charging customer-to-customer sellers transaction fees. Much like its rival Sina.com, Taobao is looking to sell advertising space to name brands, and it also plans to sell advertising space on the right column of its search page, in imitation of Google shopping.

It also plans to offer a range of value-added services to help sellers. “If you do business yourself you can earn 100 dollars,” Taobao president Lu Zhaoxi said. “With the help of Taobao’s vast platform and network, you can earn 1,000 dollars. I’m sure you are willing to give me 20 to 30 dollars out of the extra 900 dollars, aren’t you?”
Lu said some of Taobao’s big private vendors had become fully-fledged businesses so were shifting from a customer-to-customer model to a business-to-customer model, and some name brand companies were also looking to sell their goods online. Taobao will broaden its revenue sources and emerge as a platform offering both customer-to-customer and business-to-customer services, he said.

This article originally appeared in Chinese in the China Business News on January 25, 2008. The China Perspective takes no responsibility for the accuracy of the original article

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http://rate.taobao.com/user-rate-2d7278ea0aeb0f3cac3436f0d36446ff.htm

"tianxia taobao " a TV program sponsored by alibaba.com

《天下淘宝》是一档由阿里巴巴集团联合淘宝天下周刊、浙江电视台影视娱乐频道共同打造的大型娱乐周播节目，时长45分钟，将于2010年1月开始，在每周日晚8：30的黄金时间重磅推出。 《天下淘宝》力求时尚、清新、实用的节目风格，引领睿智生活。来自全国各地的淘宝达人和资深娱乐媒体人强强联手，各自带领自己的亲友团进行游戏PK。在节目中，嘉宾将分成两个阵营，通过对指定的淘宝商城提供的网货产品进行猜价格、猜商品性能、比搭配等3个环节的对垒，最终胜出的一队将获得丰厚奖品。
与此同时，《21点疯狂大秒杀》和《淘课堂》将成为节目中最具看点和卖点的两大元素，引发收视狂潮！
"Tianxia Taobao" is an Entertaining TV progtram sponsored by alibaba.com associated with "Taobao tianxia weekly"(a megazine published by taobao.com) and Zhejiang TV entertaining Channel. Started from Jan. 2010, It shows every Sunday evening.
"Tianxia taobao" aims to be modern and practical. Talented Taobao sellers and buyers are invited to compete in the games such as price guessing,function guessing. They are divided into two groups. The winner gets big prize of product from Taobao.com. Moreover, two most attractive sections are "21 o'clock second killing" and "taobao class".

My Comments:

This is not only a TV program but also a great platform for taobao sellers to expose their products to the public, and buyers to exchange their shopping experiences. Since almost half of Chinese net citizens are taobao users, this program does draw a lot of eyeballs.
As the sponsor, taobao.com earns more popularity among the audience, and brings in a great income from taobao sellers who appear in the program.And the greatest benefit is that they turns million audience into potential taobao users.

Here's link for a new episode of "tian xia taobao"   http://www.tmall.com/go/act/integrated/tbtx.php?ad_id=&am_id=1300208262d27d5f2df6&cm_id=&pm_id=

Taobao invests RMB10m to boost app store

By: Adaline Lau, China – Beijing
Published: Jan 18, 2010
http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/17313

Here's the link of  online Taobao Application store: http://fuwu.taobao.com/service/search.htm?target_user=1

Beijing - Taobao, one of the largest online shopping portals in China, has launched a Taobao app store and committed RMB10 million to fund independent software developers on the platform.

The Taobao app store will offer tools for sellers and buyers, extensions for Taobao community sites, tools for product recommendation and mobile phone applications.

According to a Taobao representative, its app store mobile applications will be accessible on all types of handsets.

Sellers on Taobao will be able to use the applications to improve their business management and back end operations while buyers would be given tools to improve their shopping experience.

Wang Wenbin, vice president for Taobao Open Platform (TOP), said "The Taobao app store is a convenient channel for developers, investors and customers to interact directly and it will ultimately allow the market to evaluate the independent developers'
creations."

In October 2009, a TOP fund with an annual investment of RMB10 million was set up to encourage innovation among independent developers following a competition that saw more than 25 000 software developers participated.

The top three winners will receive a funding of RMB5 million while the other RMB5 million will be shared among the top 30 contestants whose first batch of applications are now available in the store.

Alibaba's Taobao.com To Boost Business-To-Consumer Business

By Loretta Chao

Of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BEIJING (Dow Jones)--Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is planning to expand its business-to-consumer online retail business, even as the burgeoning sector has grown increasingly competitive.

China's e-commerce market is expanding rapidly, with online transactions expected to grow to roughly 7% of China's massive retail market by 2013 from about 2% now, Hong Kong-based Deutsche Bank AG analyst Alan Hellawell said. Business-to-consumer transactions account for just a small portion of the overall market, but analysts said they expect that share to grow as shoppers increasingly look to buy goods online from brands and retailers they recognize.

As part of its efforts to expand its business-to-consumer business, the Hangzhou-based group's online retail company, Taobao.com, said Monday it separated the Taobao Mall business-to-consumer portal  http://www.tmall.com/ from its flagship consumer-to-consumer portal and gave it its own web address, Tmall.com.

Users could previously access Taobao Mall, on which vendors including Adidas AG, Fast Retailing Co.'s Uniqlo and Lenovo Group Ltd. sell goods to Chinese consumers, via Taobao.com.

Taobao.com Chief Financial Officer Daniel Zhang said Monday that Taobao Mall listings will still appear in Taobao.com search results, but the move is meant to differentiate the Taobao Mall brand and "give people a very clear idea that this is the first choice to find high-quality products."

He added he expects the value of transactions on Taobao Mall to grow 400% this year from last year, outpacing the growth of Taobao's consumer-to-consumer business. He declined to give a value for such transactions.

Taobao.com, which operates China's largest online retail website, has said it expects to double the value of consumer-to-consumer transactions conducted via its website to CNY400 billion ($59.9 billion) this year.

The separation of the two brands follows Taobao.com's appointment of Ye Peng, formerly chief operating officer of Chinese Internet search company Baidu Inc., as vice president overseeing Taobao Mall.

Research firm Analysys International said sales on Taobao.com accounted for 75% of all e-commerce transactions in China as of the second quarter. But while analysts said they expect Taobao.com to maintain its dominance in the overall market, they say Taobao's competition will intensify.

A number of competing business-to-consumer platforms have emerged in recent years, including 360buy.com, a website operated by Beijing Jingdong Century Trading Co. Amazon.com Inc. also operates a Chinese website, though both are much smaller than Taobao.com in terms of transaction value.

In addition, Baidu is working with Japan's Rakuten Inc. to launch an online shopping mall for Chinese Internet users, hoping to benefit from the search company's massive audience. The two companies plan to jointly invest $50 million in the site over the next three years, though a previous attempt by Baidu to enter the e-commerce market has yet to gain traction among Chinese users.

Taobao Mall will also face challenges from established, specialized websites for sales of goods such as air tickets, which the portal launched earlier this year.

For example, Ctrip.com International Ltd., China's largest online travel booking company, fills its own orders and has full control over its sales policies and service quality, while Taobao Mall, a platform for other merchants, doesn't actually fill orders.

Taobao Mall employs a number of measures to protect consumers, such as verifying the credentials of all of its Taobao Mall merchants and requiring that they all offer a seven-day, no-questions-asked refund policy. But service quality can still vary from merchant to merchant.

Taobao.com, which currently has 50 million daily unique visitors, said it will invest 200 million yuan over the next three months in a marketing campaign for Taobao Mall, including an ad campaign on state broadcaster China Central Television and an offline billboard campaign across major cities in China.

Alibaba Group, in which Yahoo Inc. owns a roughly 40% stake, is the parent of Hong Kong-listed business-to-business trading website Alibaba.com. (1688.HK).

-By Loretta Chao, The Wall Street Journal; 8610 8400 7799; loretta.chao@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20101101-704939.html

Taobao launches Web search engine

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-10-12 15:31
souce from: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2010-10/12/content_11400559.htm


taobao's search engin: http://www.etao.com/

SHANGHAI - A unit of Alibaba Group, China's largest e-commerce firm, has launched a search engine, taking aim at a lucrative market now dominated by Wall Street darling Baidu Inc, Reuters reported on Oct 12.

Taobao.com, China's largest and most popular online e-commerce website with a consumer focus, launched its public beta test of the search site, called Etao, on Oct 9, a spokeswoman said on Oct 12.

"Etao is a shopping search engine launched by Taobao," she said in a statement, referring to the site's name.

Etao provides not only search options for e-commerce, but also a comprehensive search engine powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine.

The move is a direct challenge to reigning Chinese search leader Baidu, which dominates more than 60 percent of the Chinese search market by advertising revenue.

"Advertising to people who have come already to buy something is a very attractive proposition," Mark Natkin, director of consulting firm Marbridge Consulting, said of Etao.

"It (Etao) has the potential to pull a very valuable segment of users, by intention, from Baidu," Natkin said.

Alibaba Group is about 40 percent owned by Yahoo Inc.

China's Internet search market is currently controlled by Baidu and Google, which collectively have about 90 percent of the market.

But Google's share has been slipping since its high profile threat to leave China earlier this year. Chinese Internet firms are jostling with each other to eat into Google's share and compete against Baidu.

In August, Sohu, China's No 2 Internet portal said it will sell 32 percent of its Sogou search engine to investors that include Alibaba Group.

"There's always the potential for a threat to Baidu, but they (Taobao) are still in the early stages," said an analyst with an investment bank who is not authorized to speak with media.

"It may take them at least another three to four years to build up their technology."

Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Bing in China. The firm told the Wall Street Journal in September it is looking for a partner there to help the company play a major role in China's Internet search market -- the world's largest with more than 400 million users

Taobao.com aims for overseas Net sales expansion

By Qian Yanfeng (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-27 11:23

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2010-10/27/content_11464512.htm

SHANGHAI - China's largest online shopping platform, Taobao.com, said on Tuesday that it plans to expand into the European and American markets by launching a new shopping section at mall.taobao.com for cross-border online shopping at the beginning of next year, allowing Chinese e-consumers to shop beyond the Asian markets.

Chinese Internet users can already buy products online from Japanese vendors, after Taobao's partnership with Yahoo Japan Corp in June launched two online platforms to allow vendors to sell in each other's markets, the first step in its overseas expansion strategy.

The new shopping section will allow European and American brand names to sell their products at mall.taobao.com.

"Following our entry into the Japanese market, we are now preparing to test the waters in the European and American markets. Discussions with European and American brand names are already under way," Lu Peng, vice-president of Strategic Business Development at Taobao, told China Daily on the sidelines at the Cross-Straits E-commerce Conference 2010.

"Chinese consumers have a huge demand and growing purchasing power for overseas products, which spells great potential for cross-border e-commerce, and we think Taobao can play a major role in that," he said.

When launched, the new integrated platform will provide Chinese e-consumers with access to products from several countries, including the United States, Great Britain and Germany, he said.

The company's partnership with Yahoo Japan has also been faring well, said Lu, but he refused to reveal transaction volumes for the platform, which provides users from the two countries with 8 million Japanese and 50 million Chinese product listings.

Lu said the platform would need to upgrade its business-to-consumer (B2C) model by cooperating with bigger and more competitive Japanese companies, instead of small and medium-sized individual shops, to both raise efficiency and provide a wholesale service to Chinese consumers.

The same problem exists in its partnership with Taiwan-based eDynamics, whose B2C e-commerce subsidiary, oBuy, opened a store on Taobao in 2006.

"But with the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) between the mainland and Taiwan earlier this year, cross-Straits cooperation in the e-commerce sector is expected to grow more rapidly," said Lu.

Taobao, a subsidiary of the Chinese online giant Alibaba Group, is China's top e-commerce player, taking 80 percent of the country's online shopping market.

Its move to expand into the overseas market is also intended to attract Chinese consumers, who usually turn to foreign procurement service providers when shopping for non-Asian products, and help regulate the market, he said.

Online shopping in China has boomed in recent years, as the nation's more than 400 million Internet users - the world's biggest online population - become increasingly Internet-savvy.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the transaction volume in China's online shopping market reached 250 billion yuan ($37.52 billion) last year.