Perspectives
China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site, 360Buy – also known as JingDong Mall – appears to have blocked Alibaba’s product search-engine Etao.com from indexing its site. Looking at the ‘robots.txt’ file for 360Buy, it now says “User-agent: EtaoSpider Disallow: /” (pictured above) in a move that signals heightened rivalry between the two companies. Indeed, 360Buy is second in the B2C sector to Alibaba’s own Tmall.com.
There are still products from 360Buy listed on the Etao product search results at the moment.
Alibaba created Etao.com as an agnostic search engine that, they say, fairly indexes all e-commerce sites.