Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

westiseast.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 132 posts

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

#41

Post by est »

brianbreslin wrote: post #10

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…

> Does anyone know what they did in 2011 from a sales perspective?

The 11.11 fest began in 2009

2010-11-11: RMB 0.936B in Alipay

2011-11-11: RMB 5.2B in Tmall+Taobao

2012-11-11: RMB 19.1B in Tmall+Taobao

source: 2010年，淘宝当日录得9.36亿元支付宝交易额；2011年，淘宝和天猫当天的支付宝交易额约为52亿元；2012年，当天的交易额大幅增长至191亿元

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

#42

Post by nitrogen »

westiseast wrote: post #18
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #12

Reading on a low-res tablet, I couldn't see the right half of the screen. Thought you might want to know.

thanks!

While you're at it, I see the same thing in Firefox on Linux. There is no horizontal scroll bar, either, so I can't scroll to the cropped text. My window size is currently 1066x891.

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

#44

Post by kevin_p »

wilfra wrote: post #16
brianbreslin wrote: post #10

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…

They own their own version of PayPal which lots of people use, which easily links up with all of the major Chinese banks + debit cards. They also do a lot of pre-paid business where people go into the post office and put money on their account. Sounds weird but it's huge over there. Don't know about commissions but given how fiercely competitive the market is (and most of the competition is on price) there is no chan…

Taobao doesn't charge any commission; most of their income comes from advertising on the home / category / search pages (you might not have noticed they were ads because they're all for Taobao stores or products sold through Taobao), and you can also pay to add extra features/customization to your Taobao store page.

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

#45

Post by westiseast »

AllenKids wrote: post #39
grecy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will they ship anywhere? i.e. will they send an individual item to North America? or even a whole container?

Yes they will (most of times). One thing to remember: Taobao is entirely third party sellers. Nothing you buy come from Taobao itself. So from item to item, the terms vary quite a bit.

mostly, but I don't think all?? The TMall section is large retail stores - it's the equivalent of buying from a large high-street retailer. Some of them are shipping thousands of packages a day, so you can place some faith in them (ie. at least 110+ stores made more than 10million RMB in a day, so it's not like buying from a street market trader.)

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

#46

Post by ww520 »

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.

OT: sounds like there's where GO should be, integrated with Nginx to have an end-to-end async stack.

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

#50

Post by eikaterine »

ozchrisb wrote: post #28

Is 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). In a country whose average urban per capita disposable income is around 10x lower than the average per capita disposable income in the US overall, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

Post reply on HN