"1hr after the promotion opened, the first package was received." I think that is the most interesting part. It's pretty incredibile how efficient taobao is in such an inefficient country.
That's amazing but doubtful. Anyone received his/her package at 01:00 a.m.? BTW, Taobao is a third-party e-commerce platform, it doesn't handle the delivery.
it's true. the sellers prepared for this promotion sell for almost a month, the promotion sell start from 24:00, and also it's weekend.. most of buyers stay there waiting for paying. the first package arrived to the buyers in 1 hour, at 01:00 a.m. - A true story! It's not taobao handling the delivery, it's sellers, they have to deliver the goods as soon as possiable...cos too many orders,,, it's toooooooooooo many...
Does anyone know what they did in 2011 from a sales perspective? They are a marketplace for small retailers, so I'm curious what their margins are or commissions they take. What % of the total online commerce for that day was this? Also are these all credit card transactions or are they COD? Other forms of payments? Is taobao handling all the payment transactions? sorry for all the questions, I don't read chinese so…
OK, Taobao = Taobao C2C + Tabao B2C.
There are 2 parts in taobao empire,
1 is a big marketplace for those small sells, it's free for all. no charging fee, no extra hidden fee. of course the sells can buy the paid service, such as Zhitongche, it's a paid service just like adwords.
and another part is Tianmao, a new department / independent of taobao， Tianmao is for those Business and brand such as LV, Apple. It's paid market, you need pay 50-150K (Guarantee Fee) to join, and Tianmao will hold 2%-5% of transactions as profit.
And the Alipay (Zhifubao, also belong to Alibaba group), is the ONLY paygate of Taobao. with Alipay, the buyers can use almost all of the debit / credit card to pay for the orders. The Alipay handling all the transactions. If anyone want to pay with other way, such as post, or wire-trans or other offline pay service , the account will be banned.
There also COD service in Taobao now.... for more you can contact me : moonswamp # gmail.com
I don't speak or read Chinese, but my guess is that not all of these sales were online, that for many (most?) the payment occurred in retail stores.
nope - taobao is a 100% online store. It's a single shop, where individuals or big brands can setup stores. AFAIK they have no physical outlets at all, and everything goes through their own custom payment portal called Zhi Fu Bao (支付报). That's why it's so incredible!
I find this story to be complete BS. I find it hard to believe this much volume in one day from one site and everything worked like a charm. The payments gateways worked flawlessly? I think this is just a publicity stunt to drive traffic.
u r totally wrong!The payments gateways is fine！The technical skills of alibaba is beyond your imagination.Taobao has their own database called OceanBase,in that day,this database load more than 1.5 billion visit and the alipay(支付宝) finish 100 billion deal!
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…
theres a reason why you think this. it's because western corporations are threatened by the good Chinese products, so they block the imports. it's called protectionism. instead, what western regimes usually do is, they only allow the import of the cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done products. this is why people have that impression. also, western governments and corporation employ millions of shills online to promote this exact idea, so people will continue to buy expensive stuff from western corporations, thinking that they have no other choice. if people knew "the truth", the western corporations would go broke overnight.
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 peo…
but you're glossing over (conveniently) that the vast majority of crap is made in china. Not to mention the fact that China has no regard to intellectual property, is always the first to produce cheap knock-off products that blatantly ignore the inventor's IP. And, this doesn't even mention human rights. If you take off your politically correct hat for a moment you'll see that the comment "cheap, hacky, non-reliable,…
actually, most of the people at the top of the bootlegging chain in China are not mainland Chinese, they are of Hong Kong, and Taiwan origin. They just use the mainland as their base of bootlegging, and exploitation of labor. bootlegging gucci hand bags and hollywood films did not start in the mainland. it started in hong kong, and taiwan. not much has changed. it's still the same guys doing it. theyve just relocated. no, you will never hear about this in the mainstream media because hong kong and taiwan are used as a staging area by western governments to destabilise China as a whole. and you cant make your lackeys look bad, because subversion must be rewarded. as far as quality goes, China has sent a few space ships up into space without one ever blowing up. on the other hand, the united states has had 2 of them blow up already. keep in mind that the u.s. hires the top scientists in the world to work on their space ships. while, China relies strictly on Chinese scientists because they are under sanctions from the rest of the world. Despite these odds, China still built their own space ship using their own technology. you should also know that if the u.s. did not bring foreign scientists in, would they be able to go as far as they do. google, and microsoft both hire foreign engineers heavily. take a walk around the silicon valley, and see how many Asians you see. i find it very hard to accept what the shills are pushing. and that includes you hnriot.
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.
word up. and no freezing your account for signing in from the different ip address, or whatever reason ebay decides is worthy of taking your money
Particularly 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…
this is not because China isn't trying to market itself outside, it is because if China expands overseas, then it will threaten the interests of amazon, ebay, facebook, twitter, yahoo, gmail,cnn, and fox. if people had a chance to try out the Chinese version, 50% of them would choose the Chinese version instead. facebook, twitter, amazon, ebay, cnn, fox, gmail, and yahoo would absolutely retaliate by launching some kind of trade war, including all kinds of dirty tricks, sabatoge, etc. this is what China is afraid of, and this is why China is afraid to expand. why do you think most of the world uses gmail, yahoo, facebook, ebay, and twitter. it's not that they are unable to develop their own, it's that they don't want to break the unwritten rule, that is, do not threaten the business interests of american corporations. this is why the u.s. spends so much on military. if they had no military to back up their corporations, then people would simply go in their own direction, and the market would be up for grabs, but for now, it will stay firmly in the grips of the u.s. corps
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?
well, i'd say that the unfriendly business environment lies in the usa, and europe. i look around China and see different car brands from throughout the world. however, when i go to western countries, the choices are limited to europe, usa, japan, and south korea. the same goes for other products. for example, there are abou 20 different tablet brands in China, however, in western countries, only a couple of them really dominate. China allows just about every brand of tablets, and mobile phones you can think of. however, the west is extremely limiting when it comes to the choices of brands. there are probably 5 different shoe brands in China that are the equivalent of nike, and adidas. they are called lining, 361, anta, peak, and xtep. in addition to selling these brands, China also welcome brands from the west, and throughout the world to be sold in China. my conclusion is that the west is much more business unfriendly than China. sure China does have some protectionist measures, but overall, after i have compared the two places, i find that i have much more choices in China than in the west. by the way, skype, ebay, and amazon all operate in China, and have millions of customers. on the other hand, how many taobao, 360buy, and uu customers can you find in europe?