structural:reformatting, structural:expansion
Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it was the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Taobao Marketplace facilitates consumer-to-consumer retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores that mainly cater to consumers in Chinese-speaking regions and abroad, which is made payable by online accounts. Its stores usually offer an express delivery service. Sellers are able to post goods for sale either through a fixed price or an auction. Auctions make up a small percentage of transactions, whereas the majority of the products are new merchandise sold at fixed prices. Taobao users usually read feedback and compare items from multiple shops. Taobao's popular payment platform is Alibaba's Alipay With over 1 billion product listings as of 2016, the combined transaction volume of Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com reached 3 trillion yuan in 2017. eBay acquired Eachnet, China's online auction leader at the time, for US$180 million. It became a major contender in the Chinese consumer e-commerce market. To counter eBay's expansion, Taobao offered free listings to sellers. It introduced instant messaging for facilitating buyer-seller communication and an escrow-based payment tool: Alipay. Taobao became mainland China's market leader within two years. Its market share grew from 8% to 59% between 2003 and 2005, while eBay China dropped from 79% to 36%. eBay shut down its Chinese site in 2006. In October 2010, Taobao beta-launched eTao as an independent search engine for online shopping to provide and merchant information from a number of major consumer e-commerce websites in China. Online shoppers would be able to use the site to compare prices across sellers. According to the Alibaba Group web site, eTao offers products from Amazon China, Dangdang, Gome, Yihaodian, Nike China and Vancl, as well as Taobao and Tmall. In June 2011, Jack Ma, executive chairman and former chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, announced that Taobao would split into three different companies: Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, and eTao. The move was said to be necessary for Taobao to “meet competitive threats that emerged in the past two years during which the Internet and e-commerce landscape has changed dramatically.” In 2012 Taobao began to accept international Visa and MasterCard credit and debit cards. On 29 April 2013, Alibaba announced an investment of US$586 million in Sina Weibo. According to Reuters, the deal “should drive more web traffic to Alibaba's Taobao Marketplace”. On August 1, 2013, Alibaba launched Weibo for Taobao, which allows users to link Sina Weibo accounts with Taobao accounts.