Introduction of Taobao

E-commerce is using simple, fast and low-cost electronic communications to transact, without face-to-face meeting between the two parties of the transaction. After the middle 1990s, the rapid popular of the Internet makes E- commerce enter common families. The online C2C market in China is playing an important role in China's e-commerce marketplace. Taobao was a Chinese C2C vendor, founded by Alibaba Corporation in May 10, 2003. It is a nationwide personal transaction stage which Alibaba invested 4.5 billion to make the biggest personal transaction website in the world. Taobao means every treasure can be dug and every treasure can be sold. Taobao spans both consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales, and during the last 12 years it has achieved remarkable growth. In 2005, Taobao’s income had reached 1.4billion broken beyond Wal-Mart. In 2007, Taobao transaction volume achieved 7.2billion, increase over156% from 2006. First half year of 2008, Taobao turnover had reached 6.88 billion. In 2009, annual income reached 34.72 billion.

Fig.1 The growth rates of the world's leading retailers in the third quarter of the year 2008

By the end of 2014, Taobao has registered membership of nearly 500 million, daily active users over 120 million, the number of online products reach 1 billion, in c2c market, Taobao accounted for 95.1% of market share. Taobao has rapid development in cellphone, according to recently report on digital mobile shopping in 2014, mobile phone and Tmall and Taobao's market share reached 85.1%. Taobao has created direct employment reached 4,677,000. With the expansion of Taobao size and increases number of users, Taobao C2C network from a single market became include C2C, distribution, sale, direct supply, a variety of customized e-business models in retail district.