Shopping skills in taobao

In this hub, we will cover:

The history of Taobao-How Ebay lost to Taobao in China?

What to buy from Taobao and how to select the right seller?

The history of Taobao-How Ebay lost to Taobao in China?

I believe most people know about Ebay, the global biggest online marketplace for C2C and B2C. Can you image such a giant would totally lost to Taobao in China? In 1995 Ebay was established in USA for the first online marketplace for C2C. Since then Ebay has expended rapidly around the world. In 2002 Ebay entered into China by merging the leading C2C marketplace- eachnet.com and become the biggest one in China. In 2003 Taobao was established by Ma Yun, a man with wildest ambition in ecommerce and also the founder of Alibaba. At the beginning, Ebay was supreme in everything over Taobao and Ebay considered Taobao to be nothing. Ebay charged certain amount service fee in listing and selling out products while Taobao made it totally free. 

It’s in the backbone that Chinese netizens believe internet is the place for free resource and they don’t have habit to pay for anything out there in the internet. Taobao the very local enterprise with very local ideology read this well provided marketplace serve totally free. No matter how hard Ebay blocked all the possible channel that Taobao promoted in, Taobao beat Ebay to be the biggest online marketplace in 2004. 3 year later in 2007, Ebay China changed their language to traditional Chinese overnight, which signified Ebay withdrew out from China.

Since 2004 Taobao become this biggest online marketplace for C2C and B2C, Taobao has led Ecommerce in China to a new era. Most netizens do their first online shopping in Taobao agent rather than any other website and Taobao changes the shopping habit of Chinese people and even the business model. Back in 2006, no one believed in internet shopping and considered it ridiculous because people think it too risky with actually see or touch the item before buying. But convenience, variety of choice and cheaper price compared to offline shopping gradually attracted people to try it and once people tried it they begin to love and some even become addictive to it. Personally I didn’t shop online before 2008 but some of my friends were doing so. They persuaded me to try Taobao and I shopped a pair of leather shoes at 180RMB on it. Out of my surprise, the quality seems to better than my usual shopping store. I began to shop more and more in Taobao and even considered to open my store in Taobao.

No one doubts the business model in Taobao here in China. In Nov. 11, the so-called “Singles Day ”, 3 billion RMB sales volume was transacted in Taobao in a day, which is greater than 1.25 billion USD in Cyber Monday in USA last year. Online shopping in Taobao changes the way of merchants circulating. Many factories, retailers or distributors crowd into Taobao for they’re seeing shrinking business in offline china ebay while rapid development in online shopping. For many big brands, they can’t keep resisting Taobao anymore as in previous years and open Tmalls (a kind of store) in Taobao.

What to buy from Taobao and how to select the right seller?

It seems Taobao is a good place to shop from. Which kinds of products worth buying and how to select the good buyer? The below suggestions are for your reference.

• Review the feedback of sellers

There’re three types of feedback left for each item sold by seller.

Positive: 4-5 stars

Neutral: 3 stars

Negative: 1-2 stars

For most of the case the more positive feedbacks the better the item/seller should be. But sometimes we need to take a deep look at the quality of the positive feedbacks. Back in 2009, the Taobao rules in feedback are not as strict as now. Many sellers increase their positive feedback by cheating. They simply hire someone to virtually buy their items but without actual offline transaction. Today this kind of cases is absolutely again the rules, but higher level cheating on positive feedback still exist. We would better pay attention to who and when the positive feedbacks are left by.

• Review the Detailed Seller Ratings Score

If you shop on Ebay, you know what Detailed Seller Ratings is and in Taobao, they have the same rating as picture shown below. Feedback and Detailed Seller Ratings Score are objective index that you can check directly on each seller’s store. No one can guarantee their reliability and they’re just for reference only. And for C store, you can choose the ones with high credit scores.

• Check the quality of the picture shootings

It comes very natural that good picture will persuade shoppers to purchase more easily. But you need to make sure that the pictures are really shoot from their products. For most of the cases, small or amateur sellers (remember every Chinese citizen can open store in Taobao), they don’t have the time and money to do the professional product shooting. So they steal high quality commercial picture from other and modify the all the branding information to their own by Photoshop. If you buy from this kind of sellers, it might be at high risk that the products are not as good as you see in their stores pictures. Many store owners in Taobao realize the importance of their original pictures and put watermark in them. It gets harder and harder to modify the branding information. So if you find the shooting style of the picture not consistent with each other or different logo with their store, you can say the picture are stolen from others.

• Don’t believe Unreasonable cheap price

Many people come to Taobao is because of cheaper price. But how cheap should it be? Copyright in Taobao is a serious question. For many international brand products sold in Taobao are not authorized to do so by the official company. So think twice if you can buy a LV handbag just for several hundred RMB.