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Taobao Marketplace is a  Chinese electronic commerce and Consumer-to-consumer （C2C） website founded by Alibaba Group on 10 May, 2003. It is one of the largest online retailer in Asia-Pacific.

Taobao Market place has separate retail websites for China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and South-east Asia. by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online retail stores that mainly cater to consumers through a fixed price or by auction on new and old products.

With around 760 million product listings as of March 2013, Taobao Marketplace is one of the world’s top 20 most visited websites according to Alexa. For the year ended March 31, 2013, the combined gross merchandise volume (GMV) of Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com exceeded 1 trillion yuan.

Sellers are able to post new and used goods for sale or resale on the Taobao Marketplace either through a fixed price or by auction. The overwhelming majority of the products on Taobao Marketplace are brand new merchandise sold at a fixed price, while auctions merely make up a very small percentage of transactions. Buyers can assess seller backgrounds by information available on the site, including ratings, comments and complaints.

History
Taobao Marketplace (formerly "Taobao") was launched in May 2003 by Alibaba Group after eBay acquired Eachnet for 180 million USD and became a major player in the Chinese consumer e-commerce market. Taobao decided to offer free listings to sellers and introduced website features designed to act in the best interests of local consumers, such as an instant messaging tool for facilitating buyer-seller communication and an escrow-based payment tool, Alipay. Between 2003 and 2005, Taobao became the undisputed market leader in mainland China by having its market share surged from 8% to 59%. In 2006, Taobao's competitor, eBay, shut down its China site from the result of its market share plunging from 79% to 36%.

In April 2008, Taobao introduced a newly dedicated B2C platform called Taobao Mall which gives a reputation of good quality and brand name goods for Chinese consumers.

In November 2010, Taobao Mall launched an independent web domain, Tmall.com enhancing its focus on product verticals and improvements in shopping experience in November 2010.

In June 2011, Tmall.com became an independent business.

In January 2012, Taobao mall changed its name to Tian Mao (Tmall)

In October 2013 Tmall became the eighth most visited web site in China.

In 2008, Taobao fueled the overall growth of the Chinese online shopping industry, through execution of the “Big Taobao” strategy with the aim of becoming a provider of e-commerce infrastructure services for all e-commerce market participants.

In October 2010, Taobao beta launched eTao as an independent searching engine for online shopping, providing product and merchant information from Amazon China, Dangdang, Gome, Yihaodian, Nike China and Vancl, as well as Taobao and Tmall. to compare prices from different sellers and identify products to buy.

In May 2011, Alibaba Group opened a physical furniture store in Beijing under the Taobao Mall brand. The five-story 25,000sqm Taobao Mall iFengChao Furniture Showroom opened as a complement to their online stores.

In June 2011, Alibaba Group Executive Chairman and former CEO Jack Ma announced that Taobao would be split into three different companies: Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, and eTao to “meet competitive threats that emerged in the past two years during which the Internet and e-commerce landscape has changed dramatically.”

From 2012 onwards, Taobao began to accept international Visa and MasterCard credit cards; prior, only domestic banks were supported by AliPay. The plan to support international credit cards was announced in late 2011.

On August 1, 2013, Alibaba launched Weibo for Taobao, which allows users to link Sina Weibo accounts with Taobao accounts.

Tmall.com
Tmall.com offers a shopping experience for increasingly affluent Chinese consumers that offers them the opportunity to buy Western brands. According to the Alibaba Group web site, these brands include UNIQLO, L’Oréal, adidas, P&G, Unilever, Gap, Ray-Ban, Nike and Levi's. ). Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace set a record for highest single-day transaction volume during a special promotion on November 11, 2012, facilitating the sales of goods totaling 19.1 billion RMB on the day. For the year ended March 31, 2013, the combined gross merchandise volume (GMV) of the two platforms exceeded 1 trillion RMB.

Ma Units
Tmall.com uses “Ma yun” unit as their rental fee, which derives from the name of the Alibaba founder’s name, Jack Ma. “1 ma” equals to 160 thousand RMB per year.

Mascot
Taobao’s mascot is the ant, representing their corporate culture as well.

Alipay
Alipay (www.alipay.com), is a third-party online payment platform an escrow-based online payment platform launched in 2004. It is the preferred payment solution for transactions on Taobao Marketplace and most widely used third-party online payment solution in China. To ensure safe transactions, Alipay uses an escrow system through which payment is only released to the seller when the buyer has received his or her goods in satisfactory condition.

According to the Alibaba Group web site, Alipay partners with multiple financial institutions as well as Visa and MasterCard to facilitate payments in China and abroad.

AliWangWang (TradeManager)
A distinctive feature of shopping on Taobao Marketplace is the pervasive communication between buyer and seller prior to the purchase through its embedded proprietary instant chat program, named AliWangWang. It has become a habit among Chinese online shoppers to “chat” with the sellers or their customer service team through AliWangWang to inquire about products, engage in bargaining, etc., prior to purchasing products.

Happy Taobao
In Dec. 2009, Taobao together with Hunan TV set up Happy Taobao, Inc for television shopping. Not only did Hunan TV launch an entertainment called "Happy Taobao", Taobao Marketplace also created channels and independent websites, both of which were to combine electronic commercial with TV media.

Others
Taobao Marketplace has introduced various new features and services in recent years to create a more holistic user experience for online shoppers and retailers. For instance, in January 2010, it launched the Taobao application created by independent developers through the Taobao Open Platform, to be downloaded by consumers in App Store ; in March 2010, it introduced the Taobao Data Cube platform, which gives small businesses access to its aggregate consumer transactions data for insight into key industry trends; In June 2010, Taobao Marketplace partnered with Wasu Media Internet Limited to launch a digital entertainment products platform Taohua and an interactive digital television shopping, which are operated by a joint-venture formed by the two companies.

Chinese Singles Day
On November 11, 2011, Taobao.com and Tmall.com took 8 minutes to reach 100 millions RMB (equivalent to $15.8m) in transaction volume and after 24:00, the transaction volume reached 3.36 billions RMB.

Taobao for Southeast Asia region
In September, 2013 Taobao launched its Southeast Asian site having a translation feature available for major languages in Southeast Asia

Metrics and Financials
In 2009, Taobao Marketplace facilitated approximately 200 billion Chinese Yuan in gross merchandise volume.

In June 2012, Taobao Marketplace has more than 5 million registered users as June 2013 and currently hosts more than 80 million product listings.

In September 2013, Taobao ranked 12th overall in Alexa's internet rankings.

On March 31, 2013, the combined gross merchandise volume (GMV) of Taobao and Tmall.com combined exceeded RMB1 trillion.

On April 29, 2013, Alibaba announced an investment of USD 586 million in Sina Weibo. According to Reuters, the deal “should drive more web traffic to Alibaba's Taobao Marketplace, China's largest e-commerce website with a consumer focus.”