Tag Archives: Penn Olson

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.
According to rumors in the Chinese media, Alibaba’s online payments platform, Alipay, has completed its technical preparation for expanding to global users. In the next one or two months, sources claim, overseas users will be able to use Alipay directly on the company’s own e-commerce sites – Taobao, Tmall, and Alibaba.com – as well as numerous Chinese domestic websites that make use of it for online purchases.
360buy – also known as Jingdong Mall – is now China’s second largest B2C online market place. Yesterday afternoon, 360buy announced on its official Sina Weibo account that the company had just received its 100 millionth order. Also, its number of registered customers has reached 28 million. The site sells primarily 3C products, but it has diversified into books as well The order was placed by someone in Changsha, central China, who will, as a reward, get the whole order free of charge.
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has today released a paper entitled 2011 China Group Buy Users Investigative Report which paints a picture of the daily deals landscape in China – and the many dissatisfied users who buy the deals. In total, 42.2 million of China’s 500 million netizens have used group buy sites in the past year and an astonishing 45.6 percent of them have had negative experiences with what they’ve bought. Of course, that’s often an issue with vendors rather than with the deals sites themselves.
Export Now was founded in 2010 by Frank Lavin, former U.S. Ambassador and Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade. Its purpose is simple. It helps U.S. businesses place their products in China via Taoball Mall, China’s leading B2C shopping site. Export Now has an exclusive store at Taoball Mall to do exactly that. Here are the five steps involved:
Xiaomi, China’s remarkably cheap potential iPhone killer, met with an awful lot of interest when they started taking preorders for the phones, which will begin shipping later this month. In fact, they sold 300,000 handsets – their preorder limit – within just 34 hours. It seems not all of those preorder customers were adoring fans; or perhaps they’re fans that have been tempted by the chance to make some money, but with high demand and a low supply, people have begun selling their Xiaomi preorder numbers on Taobao and other Chinese ecommerce sites.
Bang on schedule, Tencent’s major play in the B2C e-commerce marketplace opened this morning. Called QQ Buy, it’s the internet giant’s push against the dominance of Alibaba, especially its brand-oriented TMall site. The new Buy.qq.com will have a similar focus on well-known brands and labels, and also apes TMall’s move to allow rival, specialist e-commerce sites to open up virtual storefronts. We’ve already confirmed with Tencent that OKBuy, WalMart-backed YiHaoDian, 51Buy, V+, Kela, and TianTian are all on-board. It’s an attempt by the two major players to be the Chinese consumer’s choice of one-stop online shopping.
According to Chinese media, Chinese e-commerce service 360buy.com is gearing up to hire 20,000 new employees next year, including 5,000 new graduates and 1,000 software engineers. That’s on top of the 13,000 employees that the company already has under its payroll. In the current e-commerce scene in China, hiring boatloads of people might be cause for concern given recent updates we’ve been hearing about Groupon’s staff cuts in the country. But 360buy appears confident and ready to expand, so we’ll have to wait and see how this announcement pans out.
Stanford Business has put the footage of Jack Ma’s recent speech online. The Alibaba CEO raised eyebrows on both sides of the ocean when he says – very deliberately – that he was “very interested in Yahoo” during the talk. But the entire talk is worth a watch if you have an hour to spare. He talks with a lot of passion about the success of Alibaba, but also alludes their many mistakes and difficulties, including Taobao’s intellectual property challenges.