TAOBAO.COM TO INTEGRATE GROUP BUYING WEBSITES

AsiaInfo Services
05-18-2011
Taobao.com to Integrate Group Buying Websites

HANGZHOU, May 18, 2011 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Lately, Alibaba Group Board Chairman Jack Ma revealed the company's intention for B2B business shift at the shareholder meeting held in Hong Kong. Actually, Alibaba has begun restructuring affiliated operations since last year, planning the promotion of its group-buying platform after adjustment.

After spinning off B2C business and changing the ownership of Alipay.com, this week, Taobao.com will change the name of its group buying Web page Ju.taobao.com that was launched in 2010, showing that the company pays high attention to the business.

The group-buying platform of Taobao.com is believed to have greatly influenced the Chinese market since its promotion. However, most analyses have not included the Web site in their statistics.

As a result, Lashou.com is considered as the largest Chinese group buying service provider. The group-buying platform of Taobao.com is certainly unwilling to lag behind.

Actually, since it was spun off from Jianghu.taobao.com for independent operation on March 21, 2010, the group-buying platform of Taobao.com has recorded trading value of more than CNY 600 million per month and ranked number one among domestic peers.

Taobao.com aims to improve the brand influence of the group-buying platform through name change. By far, Tencent Holdings Limited (SEHK: 0700), SINA Corporation (Nasdaq: SINA), NetEase.com Inc. (Nasdaq: NTES) and Sohu.com Inc. (Nasdaq: SOHU) have also forayed into the group buying market. However, their related operations have unsatisfying performance.

Although its surprising data have not won acknowledgement among analysts, the group-buying platform of Taobao.com is not satisfied to be only an industrial Web site. Instead, it plans to become an open platform integrating related service.

Notably, group buying navigation Web sites are generally considered as group buying platforms. For example, the open platform of Internet security software builder Qihoo 360 has access to plenty of mainstream group buying Web sites.

However, insiders believe that group buying navigation Web sites are only collecting and providing information and customers still need to visit the platforms of group buying service providers to complete shopping and payment.

In contrast, the group-buying platform of Taobao.com will form deeper cooperation with other group buying Web sites, through which customers could complete shopping and payment on the platform of Taobao.com.

By far, the group-buying platform of Taobao.com has contacted with Lashou.com, Ftuan.com and 58.com and talked about possible cooperation forms. The latter will use the payment service provided by Alipay.com and share rich user resources from Taobao.com. The group-buying platform temporarily has no plan for profit making.

(USD 1 = CNY 6.50)

Source: www.chnvc.com (May 18, 2011)

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