As a marketplace how does the discounting work? Do they entice their merchants to put up discounts on this day? Are they mainly doing centeralised fulfillment like a fulfilled by amazon or is it up to the merchants to dispatch?
Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
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Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#52Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#53Reading on a low-res tablet, I couldn't see the right half of the screen. Thought you might want to know.
problem solved, thanks again.
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#54I've been using taobao intensively for our business for quite a long time. we are a hardware start-up, we bought components from taobao, make, assemble PCB prototypes from taobao, It's so much better than ebay, for example, they have a IM client for you to chat with the seller, negotiate price and shipping cost in real time, and once the deal is made, they can change the price instantly for you.
There also sites that buy taobao things for you and ship them to the US, so all you need is a paypal account or a credit card, and the ability to read Chinese.
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#55Is their any information that confirms this. $3.1 billion is almost .5% of China's GDP. This sounds wrong.
You're off by a factor of 10. That being said, it still seems dubious--given China's online population of 538 million people, that's $5.7 average per person spent, which is a little higher than the average per person expenditure for last year's entire Cyber Monday ($1.2 billion according to the article, and around 210 million people online in the US as of February 2011 according to an online source makes about $5.6).…
fair point - the figures released by taobao are those in the article, so if you distrust those, then so be it.
Anecdotally, I believe it. Everyone I know was buying stuff that day, and not in small amounts - I bought 2 years worth of toothpaste, some baby products, shower gel... average per-order value needs only to be 180RMB, 86RMB per reported user, which isn't a lot of money at all here, despite income disparity.
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#56Incredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done. That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the amount of work necessary to make things function at "China scale".
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#57Particularly fascinating, that as a long time daily (hourly?) reader of HN I've never even heard of Taobao before today.
China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own. The average citizen in China does not use any foreign websites to do anything [citation needed]. All the services you and I consume online are replicated in China by Chinese companies. From Gmail to Yahoo!, from Facebook to twitter, from Amazon to eBay, from CNN to FO…
> China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own.
Same goes for Russia.. and in smaller scale to some other countries.
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#58Incredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done. That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the amount of work necessary to make thing…
Two words of praise followed by a stream of acknowledged personal biases and admitted stereotypes, which are forwarded anyway. For what reason? To prove the author's own point that he/she doesn't understand the scale of a company which serves one billion people?
My humble suggestion is this: next time, if you don't have a good reason to recite publicly a litany of unfounded assumptions about an entire country and people, don't -- write something like this instead:
> Incredibly impressive. I know nothing about China.
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#59Particularly fascinating, that as a long time daily (hourly?) reader of HN I've never even heard of Taobao before today.
Taobao is awesome. The barrier is a bit higher without being able to read Chinese, but with someone to help you navigate the final portions, it's a damn good deal. Way more relaxing than going to the markets and getting mobbed.
I wonder if there's an opportunity for a service "to help you navigate the final portions"?
Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
#60Particularly fascinating, that as a long time daily (hourly?) reader of HN I've never even heard of Taobao before today.
China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own. The average citizen in China does not use any foreign websites to do anything [citation needed]. All the services you and I consume online are replicated in China by Chinese companies. From Gmail to Yahoo!, from Facebook to twitter, from Amazon to eBay, from CNN to FO…
The reason for this is because the way the chinese internet is structured it all flows through a single back bone in and out of the country so that it can be easily censored or even cut off if needed. This means latency is terrible, when doing a traceroute out of china you can see the first hop outside the country adds at minimum 200ms. Then you factor into the fact that many sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook are blocked. The rest provide little or no content for chinese readers it is not surprising that the average chinese user never visits any foreign websites.
For every site that is created in a western country in english there is a chinese equivalent that will pop up within a few months that caters to chinese users and the chinese language. Western companies just dont care enough about the chinese users to create sites that they would be comfortable using