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

No-More Fake Products - Taobao.com

Taobao, an online auction website unit of China's leading e-commerce company Alibaba Group has taken steps to prevent fake products sellers from selling online at taobao.com.

Taobao will team up with local commerce bureaus in this anti-fake products campaign. Accounts of fake products supplieres will be permanently disabled.

Moreover, Taobao.com has also implemented automatic and manual checks on products sold on the auction website. Plus consumers will also be able to report fake products.

Meanwhile, Taobao.com also unveiled a plan to protect consumers' rights. Consumers may ask for refunds within two weeks if the products they buy had quality problems.

Taobao.com earlier said in an announcement that its transaction volume surged to RMB 99.96 billion (US$14.6 billion) in 2008, up 131% from previous year, facilitated by increased access to the Internet in the country.

Google bought US$ 1 Million domain name to enter into China's e-commerce market

BEIJING - Google is said to be entering China's e-commerce market following the purchase of a domain that may be used as a consumer-to-consumer platform, according to Chinese reports.

According to some resources, Google has bought the domain Baobei.com for US$1 million and may go live with the C2C site within the next few months. I am waiting to hear this news from some credible sources or maybe from Google itself. So it is still a rumor. Whois for the domain doesn't confirm Google as authority. Follow this b2b trade blog for latest on this news.

The news follows a string of initiatives announced by other Chinese e-commerce powerhouses to combat the decline of online purchases in light of the current economic climate.

Among these initiatives is business-to-business platform Alibaba.com’s plan to provide low-interest loans to registered SMEs through a partnership with eight banks across the country. Search engine Baidu, meanwhile, has extended its new auction platform to Japanese sellers looking to do business in China.

This will be Google’s first entry into China e-commerce market and will directly pit the search engine against Alibaba’s C2C-industry-leader Taobao.com and Baidu’s newer Youa.

Alibaba Group invests 2 bln yuan in online auction unit Taobao.com

BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) - China's leading e-commerce company Alibaba Group, the parent of Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com, has invested 2 bln yuan in online C2C auction unit Taobao.com.

In a statement on the group's web site, Ma Yun, CEO of Alibaba Group, said that the 2 bln yuan will help Taobao.com build a mature online C2C business chain.

"We will use up the entire 2 bln yuan within five years and we expect trading volume will surpass Ebay.com and Amazon.com in five years." Ma said.

According to the statement, Taobao.com has registered customers of 67 mln, and the site sees 10 mln clicks everyday.

Taobao, Eachnet See Flowering Sales On Feb. 14

Sales volume on Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce site Taobao.com exceeded RMB45 million on both February 13 and 14, reports Beijing Times quoting Taobao and Alibaba online payment subsidiary AliPay statistics. Sales were driven by Valentine's veterans: flowers, chocolate and cosmetics, with 50,000 roses sold on Taobao on Valentine's Day. Cosmetics are among the top most traded items on Taobao.com in terms of 2007 sales volume. Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma has hopes to reach annual Taobao transaction volume of RMB100 billion this year. Taobao's transaction volume increased 156.3 percent year-on-year to reach RMB43.3 billion in 2007.

eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) China subsidiary Eachnet also saw holiday gains with cosmetics sales increasing 30 percent and flower and candy sales up 20 percent on February 14, according to an Eachnet executive.

Taobao Fights Off Tricky Impersonators

Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce site Taobao.com has established a thirty-person safety team to handle customer complaints regarding fake Taobao sites and phony prize information sent via Taobao instant messaging tool Ali Wang Wang, reports National Business Daily quoting a Taobao executive. The team intends to block sites and report them to the government, said the report. Several Taobao users recently received fake prize notification SMS from Taobao impostor taobao.gegecn.com.cn asking the users to send in RMB1,000 to redeem prizes they had "won".

Alibaba's Taobao.com to launch B2C services next March

Taobao.com, Alibaba's<1688> online auction site, has confirmed that it will launch the business-to-consumer (B2C) services from Mar. 1, 2008, according to a Chinese source.

Taobao will integrate its parent's B2B and C2C platforms on its own website rather than launching a new B2C platform. Earlier reports said Taobao had already signed up well-known companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Haier, Aigo, Lining, Adidas, Giordano, and UT Starcom in preparation to expand its B2C services.

It is estimated that China's B2C market value will amount to RMB 13.6 billion in 2011, with an annual growth rate of about 48.63%. However, the market is currently dominated by dangdang.com and Amazon.com's China online retailer.

Though Taobao's existing user base will significantly aid the launch of its B2C service, the company's lack of experience and infrastructure in logistics will impede the business unit's growth, according to industry analysts.

As the most popular online auction site in China, Taobao's transaction volume for the first half of 2007 was RMB 15.7 billion, almost double the amount for the same period last year. As of Jul. 30, 2007, it has about 75 million online product listings, with 39.9 million registered users.