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Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

westiseast.co.uk

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Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#71

Post by chrischen »

Gigablah wrote: post #68
forrestthewoods wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because those are common misconceptions that I am far from alone in holding. Bringing them up in the face of a monumental achievement is helpful for both myself and others who have had similar thoughts.

In other words, you're trying to justify your own racism? (If you have to preface your statements with "This may sound horrible and racist", they probably are.)

His statement was never racist, which is probably why he qualified racist with "may sound." China isn't a race.

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#72

Post by safeaim »

marme wrote: post #60
ComputerGuru wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't care or just trying to avoid the legal quagmire that is China?

Maybe the censorship issues caused by the governmental firewall coupled with murky rules for doing business over the web in China, doesn't exactly translate into a business friendly environment?

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#74

Post by est »

marme wrote: post #60
ComputerGuru wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> flows through a single back bone in and out of the country

This is false, actually the GFW is built in parallel with multiple backbones, which in very high bandwidth the censorship fails from time to time.

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#75

Post by est »

robryan wrote: post #51

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 is like ebay, tmall.com is another branch, with certificated salers. There's no fulfillment like Amazon, everything is up to the buyer to choose.

The discounting began a month before Nov 11 where the price of the item is set as the ceiling, from the then price can only be made lower.

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#76

Post by est »

est wrote: post #43
ozchrisb wrote: post #28

Is their any information that confirms this. $3.1 billion is almost .5% of China's GDP. This sounds wrong.

Are you sure? Last year's GDP is 47 trillion RMB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_Peoples_R...

Update: the correct link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_People%27...

The single quotation mark is filtered by HN comment system

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#78

Post by doyouevenlift »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #56

Incredibly 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…

Not racist unless of course you only said that because they are Chinese...

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#79

Post by reedlaw »

For anyone who hasn't lived in China it's hard to imagine how much better Taobao is than EBay. No fees for buyers or sellers, no transaction fees for up to 1000 RMB purchase, same day delivery in many cities, prices that are way better than retail, and the ability to find just about anything.

Re: Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD

#80

Post by 9oliYQjP »

taligent wrote: post #33

Surprised nobody is talking about the most interesting part. Taobao runs almost entirely on Nginx-Lua-MySQL. And I mean entirely. There is no application server just Nginx. And every request is non blocking all the way from user to database and back. Very, very fast. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390816 In fact one of the developers from Taobao wrote the Lua integration.

I know URL file extensions aren't necessarily related to the technologies being used, by why is it that the URLs end in .php on taobao.com? Did they migrate from PHP to the new stack and then want to keep the existing URLs for some reason?
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