The current situation of China’s biggest C2C company “Taobao”

Taobao is China’s biggest online shopping company. It is a subsidiary of Alibaba Company. Taobao is like eBay and Amazon. It provides a C2C buying and selling  platform with each fixed prices and auctions.

After readjustment, Taobao cleaned up a batch of fake products, many office workers are willing to buy things on taobao rather than a retail store. Here is an example shows that their target customer looks like. An office worker who lived in Shanghai, and changed his job then moved to Suzhou city, Jiangsu province. He purchased almost everything that he need for his new place on Taobao. Items as small as needle or pen and as big as bed were delivered from Taobao. His online shopping addiction is very common in the Urban Chinese society. He has more than 20000 followers on his Blog, joked that he even bought some of his followers on Taobao. Taobao itself illustrates that because their price is cheaper and the category of products is more than eBay or other online shopping stores. Some customers are very passionate for shopping on Taobao. Sometimes, even they regret about bought some fake produces and say that they will cut off their fingers if they buy items on Taobao again. Taobao said, each of those customers brings them profits more than $8000 per year. And among those loyal consumers, young men seem to be more passionate than young women, because women are more careful about family and healthy than men, they usually compare with many items before decided to buy a product online. In recent years the repeatedly occurring food safety incidents, many young parents don’t trust milk at retail stores. Most of them choose purchase milk overseas on Taobao.

Taobao has more than 500 million registered users as of end of 2012.The largest customers group of Taobao called “night fighters”. It has a population of almost 80 million. Those people usually shopping online from 11pm middle night till next morning. The total gross merchandise volume of Taobao more than 100 billion US dollar last year.

Reference:http://news.alibaba.com/specials/aboutalibaba/aligroup/index.html