Digital Marketing report for Taobao Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Digital Marketing report for Taobao - Essay Example Those who have their products on sale have an option of quoting fixed prices or auctioning their products (Xun&Lixia, 2009). Most buyers visit Taobao because of its transparency since each seller is required to provide working contact information and offer items for sale, which are physically available. The site gives buyers an opportunity to rate services received they can post compliments or complains and the same is available to other buyers to view. Before the year 2003, eBay was the market leader in ecommerce in china where it charged sellers for posting selling items on its online market. Alibaba wanted to get part of this huge online business hence it established Taobao. Taobao came with extra features including free listings, instant messaging to the seller and buyer, email facility to the seller and a secure payment tool. With all this impressive features, its market share jumped from 5% to 60% in only two years of existence, eating into eBay’s market share that reduced from 80% to 35% over the same period. eBay decided to close down its operations in China in the year 2006 to avoid making further losses.By mid-2007, Taobao controlled a massive 83.6 % of the C2C market share, followed by Paipai and in third place we had Tom&eBay. A graphical presentation is as shown below: The exit of eBay gave Taobao an opportunity to reinvent itself more given that it did not have any more stiff competition. The company introduced a dedicated business to consumer platform known as Taobao mall, which offers exclusively high quality Chinese products to the Chinese market. Taobao mall established its own web link, Tmall.com, which focuses primarily on product verticals and gives clients an excellent shopping platform. In 2008, Taobaodecided to champion online sales for the Chinese economy by employing Big Taobao strategy,a strategy that