Baidu Youa fightback to counterfeits with Spring Thunder

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commernce website Youa.com, a Baidu company, has taken an initiative called "Spring Thunder" to seek out and punish counterfeit products suppliers on their website. Spring Thunder will be executed from February 17 2009 to March 31 2009.

A similar plan was launched by competitor C2C website Taobao.com recently. Taobao annouced to that it will disable all those trade members found selling fake or counterfeit products on their website. In the first run, Baidu posted a list of 15 sellers that are no longer eligible to sell goods on Youa.com on Tuesday.

Whole Taobao story: No-more Fake Products - Taobao.com

Baidu launches C2C marketplace “Youa”

Baidu, the world’s leading Chinese search engine, officially launched their consumer to consumer e-commerce platform “Youa”. Baidu has their own branded online payment system called BaiFuBao, to make purchases on Youa. Youa was previously available to 10,000 pre-approved sellers and 50,000 participants in closed beta testing.

Youa will compete with current C2C marketplace leader Alibaba’s Taobao.com which owns 57% of the marketshare. Alibaba recently announced that it will invest RMB5 billion (US$732 million) over the next five years to further strengthen the Taobao marketplace. Taobao has 80 million registered users and over 1 million sellers. Other C2C marketplaces include Paipai.com, and Eachnet.com. According to Piper Jaffray Youa will make up about 3-5% of Baidu’s estimated revenues in CY09.