Word: taobao
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...Yahoo both made investments of years and millions upon millions of dollars to tap the fast-growing Internet generation in China, and like Google, they could not gain traction. Both companies ended up pulling the plug on their China ventures, with eBay losing out to domestic Chinese auction company Taobao, and Yahoo ceding its operations for an ownership stake in Alibaba.com (which also controls Taobao). (See the top 10 internet blunders...
...eBay's dominance of the next great e-commerce market has turned out to be anything but a layup. Even before the massive capital infusion from Yahoo!, Alibaba-Taobao was making life unexpectedly difficult for Whitman & Co. Ma, 40, is an English teacher turned Internet pioneer in China, where he started a company that provided basic information about Chinese industrial companies on the Web back in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he launched Alibaba, a business-to-business site that became profitable in 2002 and last year did about $70 million in sales. In 2003, he started Taobao?"searching...
Believe it. According to Alexa.com, a market-research site that tracks e-commerce, Taobao has surged in front of eBay by a variety of measurements. As of Aug. 1, Taobao was reaching 15,800 out of every 1 million Internet users, compared with just under 10,000 for eBay China. The number of page views per user?a measure of interest in the site?was 10.7 for Taobao vs. 7.4 for eBay. Most analysts agree that GMV is also a reasonable standard of performance. In the first quarter of this year, Taobao announced $120 million GMV vs. $90 million...
That could turn out to be wishful thinking. The same Alexa.com data that put Taobao in front also show a distinct narrowing of the gap. The reach-per-million-users data, for example, have Taobao's users down 6% over the past three months, while eBay's are up 32%?arguably a sign that what Taobao's Erisman sarcastically calls the "shock and awe" marketing campaign is having an effect. Meanwhile, eBay has rolled out its standard support system for big-time sellers in China. Education sessions are available once or twice a month at "eBay University," and what seller...
Whitman knows Taobao doesn't charge sellers to list items on its site, but that won't be the case next year, as Ma acknowledges. eBay believes that will be a game changer, even if the alliance with Yahoo! makes Taobao's pockets that much deeper. But a link with Yahoo! gives Ma the capital and technology he needs to battle eBay on its terms. "Meg made a big mistake coming here," he says with a smile. "I respect her for doing so, but the chief commander shouldn't be at the front line with the troops. It just causes...