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Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD
- ghshephard 14y agoParticularly fascinating, that as a long time daily (hourly?) reader of HN I've never even heard of Taobao before today.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoChina's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own. The average citizen in China does not use any foreign websites to do anything [citation needed]. All the services you and I consume online are replicated in China by Chinese companies. From Gmail to Yahoo!, from Facebook to twitter, from Amazon to eBay, from CNN to FOX. It's really no surprise you haven't heard of this (I haven't either). Very few such Chinese sites even attempt at marketing themselves out of mainland China (notable exemption being the original Alibaba marketplace to great effect, Taobao is apparently a different site by the same group). It's fascinating how the internet has so effectively bridged other cultures while keeping others at arm's length - even when connected and technically accessible.
- arbuge 14y agoIt's a language issue. I spent some time in a major inland Chinese city this year. 2 weeks in a city of 14m people and I didn't run into a single one that spoke sufficient English for a conversation.
- bmelton 14y agoSo, for every new Chinese startup, are there hordes of people crying about why they haven't rolled out to America? (I'm sorry, this comment isn't like me, but I couldn't resist.)
- wilfra 14y agoWhy would people be crying that knockoffs of US sites have not rolled out to the US? Perhaps I missed your sarcasm...?
- xzephyr 14y agoPeople in China are well-informed about all these companies overseas and often question about the Chinese version's originality. Companies like Amazon do have their own branch in China and it's not really that isolated as you seemed to suggest.
- toyg 14y agoYou can't really complain that Chinese companies exploit a market left untouched by culturally-ignorant Western companies. I bet if more US companies spent more time targeting the Chinese market in the right way (i.e. perfect i18n support, interfaces built with Chinese languages in mind etc), these knockoffs would get less traction. (Of course there's always the political problem, the knockoffs are often State-sponsored etc etc, but I bet they'd suffer in face of superior competition, if they actually had real competition.)
- hnriot 14y agoLook what happens when western companies try? Google, for example...
- rplnt 14y ago> China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own. Same goes for Russia.. and in smaller scale to some other countries.
- marme 14y agoThe reason for this is because the way the chinese internet is structured it all flows through a single back bone in and out of the country so that it can be easily censored or even cut off if needed. This means latency is terrible, when doing a traceroute out of china you can see the first hop outside the country adds at minimum 200ms. Then you factor into the fact that many sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook are blocked. The rest provide little or no content for chinese readers it is not surprising that the average chinese user never visits any foreign websites. For every site that is created in a western country in english there is a chinese equivalent that will pop up within a few months that caters to chinese users and the chinese language. Western companies just dont care enough about the chinese users to create sites that they would be comfortable using
- safeaim 14y agoDon't care or just trying to avoid the legal quagmire that is China? Maybe the censorship issues caused by the governmental firewall coupled with murky rules for doing business over the web in China, doesn't exactly translate into a business friendly environment?
- BEIJINGSHOTS 14y agowell, i'd say that the unfriendly business environment lies in the usa, and europe. i look around China and see different car brands from throughout the world. however, when i go to western countries, the choices are limited to europe, usa, japan, and south korea. the same goes for other products. for example, there are abou 20 different tablet brands in China, however, in western countries, only a couple of them really dominate. China allows just about every brand of tablets, and mobile phones you can think of. however, the west is extremely limiting when it comes to the choices of brands. there are probably 5 different shoe brands in China that are the equivalent of nike, and adidas. they are called lining, 361, anta, peak, and xtep. in addition to selling these brands, China also welcome brands from the west, and throughout the world to be sold in China. my conclusion is that the west is much more business unfriendly than China. sure China does have some protectionist measures, but overall, after i have compared the two places, i find that i have much more choices in China than in the west. by the way, skype, ebay, and amazon all operate in China, and have millions of customers. on the other hand, how many taobao, 360buy, and uu customers can you find in europe?
- BEIJINGSHOTS 14y agothis is not because China isn't trying to market itself outside, it is because if China expands overseas, then it will threaten the interests of amazon, ebay, facebook, twitter, yahoo, gmail,cnn, and fox. if people had a chance to try out the Chinese version, 50% of them would choose the Chinese version instead. facebook, twitter, amazon, ebay, cnn, fox, gmail, and yahoo would absolutely retaliate by launching some kind of trade war, including all kinds of dirty tricks, sabatoge, etc. this is what China is afraid of, and this is why China is afraid to expand. why do you think most of the world uses gmail, yahoo, facebook, ebay, and twitter. it's not that they are unable to develop their own, it's that they don't want to break the unwritten rule, that is, do not threaten the business interests of american corporations. this is why the u.s. spends so much on military. if they had no military to back up their corporations, then people would simply go in their own direction, and the market would be up for grabs, but for now, it will stay firmly in the grips of the u.s. corps
- dmoy 14y agoTaobao is awesome. The barrier is a bit higher without being able to read Chinese, but with someone to help you navigate the final portions, it's a damn good deal. Way more relaxing than going to the markets and getting mobbed.
- grecy 14y agoWill they ship anywhere? i.e. will they send an individual item to North America? or even a whole container?
- AllenKids 14y agoYes they will (most of times). One thing to remember: Taobao is entirely third party sellers. Nothing you buy come from Taobao itself. So from item to item, the terms vary quite a bit.
- westiseast 14y agomostly, but I don't think all?? The TMall section is large retail stores - it's the equivalent of buying from a large high-street retailer. Some of them are shipping thousands of packages a day, so you can place some faith in them (ie. at least 110+ stores made more than 10million RMB in a day, so it's not like buying from a street market trader.)
- wilfra 14y agoThere are companies setup that will buy things for you on taobao and ship them to you overseas. They help with customs etc and have sites in English. Google 'taobao english' and/or 'taobao agent'
- tlrobinson 14y agoI wonder if there's an opportunity for a service "to help you navigate the final portions"?
- Tsagadai 14y agoTaobao is fantastic for buying anything China makes (which is almost everything). It is part auction house, part business-to-business sales. There are even quite a few services to get around the language barrier. A word of caution, if something goes wrong your money is almost certainly lost. Sometimes the firm that you bought it from has folded (I've had this happen in the time it took to deliver the order) to the seller sending bricks. It is buyer beware to the extreme but usually for the price you are paying you can afford to lose the occasional shipment and still save money.
- anothermachine 14y agoInteresting to read your comment and dmoy's. On the one hand, compared to Amazon.com, Taobao sounds like a horrible shopping experience. On the other hand, compared to a shuk (or whatever the Chinese equivalent is), it is a vast improvement. Context is everything.
- westiseast 14y agowith all due respect to Tsagadai, I disagree. Taobao is an excellent shopping experience and I've never been ripped off there (perhaps my wife is an expert taobao-ista, which helps). (1) Shops are absolutely crap scared of a bad review. Shoppers avoid bad reviews like the plague, and there's normally so much competition that you can always find an alternative. The 1 time we gave a bad review, we had a call from the seller within 1 hour offering all manner of things for us to take it back. (2) Delivery is excellent - next day courier services. Taobao practically revolutionised the postal service in China because the national postal system was so bad. So, 10RMB (around £1) can get you national, next-day delivery for most small items (eg. a small parcel). (3) The mobile site is awesome, full stop. (4) There's just so much choice. I can buy official, full price products from the brand (ie, not a reseller, but the actual company), or 2nd hand, or knockoffs. Most knockoffs are clearly marked as such. (5) Safety - it's not a direct payment system per se, but an escrow service. If you aren't happy in any way with your product, you click a button and the seller gets nothing.
- 14y ago
- cwilson 14y agoAfter reading this I messaged a friend of mine who has been living in Hong Kong for the past 3 years and he said, "every single female I know uses Taobao religiously, it's awesome; I'm surprised you guys haven't heard of it!". That said, even after his explanation of "it's kind of like amazon prime" I still don't understand what's going on here.
- portman 14y agoI don't speak or read Chinese, but my guess is that not all of these sales were online, that for many (most?) the payment occurred in retail stores.
- westiseast 14y agonope - taobao is a 100% online store. It's a single shop, where individuals or big brands can setup stores. AFAIK they have no physical outlets at all, and everything goes through their own custom payment portal called Zhi Fu Bao (支付报). That's why it's so incredible!
- hoi 14y agoArticle forgets to mention that it was singles day in China, and Taobao did a special promotion for it. Still a good record to hol.
- westiseast 14y agofirst sentence?
- eikaterine 14y agoAlthough I still wasn't sure what "singles day" is (some sort of reverse of Valentine's Day?), it's a little clearer by itself than "double sticks day" (a phrase which yields all of 3 results on Google). Googling "singles day" explained everything.
- roy_x 14y agosingles day is kind of kidding among young people. Blogger will write articles/poets this day to comfort people whom is still single, also merchants will give a discount for the same reason... The 1st-Jan is considered to be small singles day, then "11th-Jan" and "1st-Nov" the middle singles day, and "11th-Nov" the ultimate singles day.
- aileen_0215 14y agoWow, it seems you know a lot about the Chinese new popular "festival". Your explanation is totally correct!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kaka2 14y agoright, 應該讓老外知道中國電商在「光棍節」搞促銷的手段是多麼厲害。
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brianbreslin 14y agoDoes anyone know what they did in 2011 from a sales perspective? They are a marketplace for small retailers, so I'm curious what their margins are or commissions they take. What % of the total online commerce for that day was this? Also are these all credit card transactions or are they COD? Other forms of payments? Is taobao handling all the payment transactions? sorry for all the questions, I don't read chinese so I can't find all this info on my own.
- westiseast 14y agoI don't know revenue/profit (I think they're listed, so you can check them online). Sales on this day last year was something like 5.2bn RMB from memory? Again, not sure about commissions either - I've only ever bought stuff from the site. Again, AFAIK everything goes through ZhiFuBao. It's an escrow service in fact, so the buyer must confirm receipt of the item before any money goes to the seller. There's no COD, and that's part of the success (people in China are very worried about scams and had zero faith in online shopping before Taobao setup their system). You can pay using most mainstream credit cards/banks in China, although I think things like AMEX or mastercard aren't supported.
- wilfra 14y agoThey own their own version of PayPal which lots of people use, which easily links up with all of the major Chinese banks + debit cards. They also do a lot of pre-paid business where people go into the post office and put money on their account. Sounds weird but it's huge over there. Don't know about commissions but given how fiercely competitive the market is (and most of the competition is on price) there is no chance the fees are anything like ebays (taobao is chinese ebay/amazon). Side note but interesting: most of the sellers there offer live chat customer service. You see something you want and you can immediately IM the person through taobao and ask questions, make modifications to the order and bargain on the price. It's awesome and so common that it's basically expected.
- kevin_p 14y agoTaobao doesn't charge any commission; most of their income comes from advertising on the home / category / search pages (you might not have noticed they were ads because they're all for Taobao stores or products sold through Taobao), and you can also pay to add extra features/customization to your Taobao store page.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoReading on a low-res tablet, I couldn't see the right half of the screen. Thought you might want to know.
- yaix 14y agoSame on my netbook. Needed to [ctrl]+[-].
- westiseast 14y agothanks!
- westiseast 14y agoproblem solved, thanks again.
- wilfra 14y ago"1hr after the promotion opened, the first package was received." I think that is the most interesting part. It's pretty incredibile how efficient taobao is in such an inefficient country.
- jianshen 14y agoYup! The one day courier service is one of the big draws of the site besides there being a shop for just about anything.
- AllenKids 14y agoThe country can be scarily efficient given appropriate incentives and/or connections. If something is stalled beyond reasonable period, chances are there are wheels to be oiled somewhere.
- AllenKids 14y agoThe country can be scarily efficient given appropriate incentives and/or connections. If something is stalled beyond reasonable period, chances are there are wheels to be oiled somewhere.
- yfaming 14y agoThat's amazing but doubtful. Anyone received his/her package at 01:00 a.m.? BTW, Taobao is a third-party e-commerce platform, it doesn't handle the delivery.
- moonswamp 14y agoit's true. the sellers prepared for this promotion sell for almost a month, the promotion sell start from 24:00, and also it's weekend.. most of buyers stay there waiting for paying. the first package arrived to the buyers in 1 hour, at 01:00 a.m. - A true story! It's not taobao handling the delivery, it's sellers, they have to deliver the goods as soon as possiable...cos too many orders,,, it's toooooooooooo many...
- fengxx 14y agoI think it is just a figure for advertisement or PR, please do not take it seriously. Does anyone remember the news about "Alibaba Transferred Alipay Ownership Without Yahoo Approval", by the way, Taobao is owned by Alibaba group.
- wilfra 14y agoWhat does a dispute between two corporations have to do with their reported sales figures? Racist much? Just because they are a Chinese company doesn't mean they should not be trusted.
- ozchrisb 14y agoIs their any information that confirms this. $3.1 billion is almost .5% of China's GDP. This sounds wrong.
- westiseast 14y agohttp://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/11/12/singles-adds-up-to-record-sales-for-chinas-online-retailers/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/11/12/singles... It's also all over the news in China too, as far as you trust that :)
- est 14y agoAre you sure? Last year's GDP is 47 trillion RMB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China#Current_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_Peoples_R...
- est 14y agoUpdate: the correct link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China#Current_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_People%27... The single quotation mark is filtered by HN comment system
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoYou are off by about an order of magnitude. China's GDP is about $7 trillion US.
- eikaterine 14y agoYou're off by a factor of 10. That being said, it still seems dubious--given China's online population of 538 million people, that's $5.7 average per person spent, which is a little higher than the average per person expenditure for last year's entire Cyber Monday ($1.2 billion according to the article, and around 210 million people online in the US as of February 2011 according to an online source makes about $5.6). In a country whose average urban per capita disposable income is around 10x lower than the average per capita disposable income in the US overall, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.
- taligent 14y agoSurprised nobody is talking about the most interesting part. Taobao runs almost entirely on Nginx-Lua-MySQL. And I mean entirely. There is no application server just Nginx. And every request is non blocking all the way from user to database and back. Very, very fast. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390816 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390816 In fact one of the developers from Taobao wrote the Lua integration.
- est 14y agoNot all of Taobao. Most of the business logic is still written in Java.
- ww520 14y agoOT: sounds like there's where GO should be, integrated with Nginx to have an end-to-end async stack.
- zhuzhaoyuan 14y agoThe ngx_lua solution is awesome, but Taobao runs mostly on Java, not Lua. The software stack is Nginx(Tengine)-Java-MySQL.
- binarray2000 14y agoCould someone please expand on how they integrate Java with nginx/tengine and Lua?
- 9oliYQjP 14y agoI know URL file extensions aren't necessarily related to the technologies being used, by why is it that the URLs end in .php on taobao.com? Did they migrate from PHP to the new stack and then want to keep the existing URLs for some reason?
- gingerbreadman 14y agoYeah, Agentzh(thats his handle everywhere) is very active in the Nginx community! He seems to be the one who worked quite a bit on the lua integration.
- robryan 14y agoAs a marketplace how does the discounting work? Do they entice their merchants to put up discounts on this day? Are they mainly doing centeralised fulfillment like a fulfilled by amazon or is it up to the merchants to dispatch?
- est 14y agotaobao.com is like ebay, tmall.com is another branch, with certificated salers. There's no fulfillment like Amazon, everything is up to the buyer to choose. The discounting began a month before Nov 11 where the price of the item is set as the ceiling, from the then price can only be made lower.
- yzhou 14y agoI've been using taobao intensively for our business for quite a long time. we are a hardware start-up, we bought components from taobao, make, assemble PCB prototypes from taobao, It's so much better than ebay, for example, they have a IM client for you to chat with the seller, negotiate price and shipping cost in real time, and once the deal is made, they can change the price instantly for you. There also sites that buy taobao things for you and ship them to the US, so all you need is a paypal account or a credit card, and the ability to read Chinese.
- BEIJINGSHOTS 14y agotaobao also allows you to list contact information like qq, and cell phone numbers, whereas on ebay's totalitarian platform, you cant do this
- forrestthewoods 14y agoIncredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done. That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the amount of work necessary to make things function at "China scale".
- jessedhillon 14y agoTwo words of praise followed by a stream of acknowledged personal biases and admitted stereotypes, which are forwarded anyway. For what reason? To prove the author's own point that he/she doesn't understand the scale of a company which serves one billion people? My humble suggestion is this: next time, if you don't have a good reason to recite publicly a litany of unfounded assumptions about an entire country and people, don't -- write something like this instead: > Incredibly impressive. I know nothing about China.
- forrestthewoods 14y agoWhy? Because those are common misconceptions that I am far from alone in holding. Bringing them up in the face of a monumental achievement is helpful for both myself and others who have had similar thoughts.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Gigablah 14y agoIn other words, you're trying to justify your own racism? (If you have to preface your statements with "This may sound horrible and racist", they probably are.)
- chrischen 14y agoHis statement was never racist, which is probably why he qualified racist with "may sound." China isn't a race.
- Jason_zlh 14y agohaha !!!!I'm chinese ,after reading your comments I feel strang。 and do u know the meaning of 11.11? hah ,it means single's day! hah!!!!!!!
- Jason_zlh 14y agohaha !!!!I'm chinese ,after reading your comments I feel strang。 and do u know the meaning of 11.11? hah ,it means single's day! hah!!!!!!! last , www.xiaoneiit.com ,it's my website..... :))))
- Jason_zlh 14y agowhy can not display my comment
- dengjw 14y agoniubily
- corejava 14y agoYes! We do! Some app in Java, and more and more app will in Lua. We just changed the ad system and take more than 200% up qps/pc. Jon
- androidapple 14y ago你们的评论，笑死我啦，哈哈..
- codeoedoc 14y agome 2 lol when i see your post :-)
- robingong 14y agomostly, we use java on customed JVM, mysql, customed Nginx(tengine), and etc.
- reedlaw 14y agoFor anyone who hasn't lived in China it's hard to imagine how much better Taobao is than EBay. No fees for buyers or sellers, no transaction fees for up to 1000 RMB purchase, same day delivery in many cities, prices that are way better than retail, and the ability to find just about anything.
- evansdiy 14y agoThat's true
- BEIJINGSHOTS 14y agoword up. and no freezing your account for signing in from the different ip address, or whatever reason ebay decides is worthy of taking your money
- Kayven 14y agoOK, I will give a little introduce to you foreign guys: Taobao is a B2C/C2C E-commerce site. 11/11 is called Single's Day(all number is '1', you see?), as some song sings, "single boy single boy.single all the way!". Taobao is one of the three biggest IT company in China. It is composed of taobao(C2C), tianmao(B2C), alibaba(B2B), yahoo China and etao(shopping search). Moreover, you must know that on October 30, 2012, China's largest online book retailer, oldest B2C electronic business, the first landing Nasdaq China's e-commerce company, Dangdang, declared to join Tianmao. Finally, I should say as Ma-yun said : I am very cruel, more brutal tomorrow, the day after tomorrow is very beautiful, but most of the dead tomorrow night, only those who are the real heroes to see the sun on the day after tomorrow.
- Kayven 14y agoSing with me together! single boy, single boy, single all the way! single man, single man, single all the way!
- Ce58 14y agosee what they did： //player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XNDczOTM0OTcy/v.swf
- tonyxue 14y agoFor me it's not surprised for me that you guys don't know Taobao. I would like to say you can buy everything on Taobao, it's true. For many people in China, once they come up with something want to buy, they search on Taobao first. And according to my own experience, you can get what you want in 99% of the time. You can even explor many creative goods on Taobao. Actually Taobao has done this sort of big sales many times but not big as this time. Also, there's some small villages in China that most people in the village are selling their goods on Taobao and the village has more than 5 carriers carry all the stuff every day for these sellers.
- wangwei_sh 14y agocomments so awesome
- johnyang 14y agoAs a witness, I am so proud. HBase also plays a pivotal role in this Crazy sales. One important application of taobao read 10Gbps and write 5Gbps data per second from HBase. Another incredible thing is that 1000 million trades has been processed in Alipay in one day, and even unbelievable thing is , they don't use Any IBM mini computers, instead, they only use 10 PCs with fusion IO devices in the trade database.
- lob4tt 14y agoSorry we didn't mean to spam your discussion but there just too many people in China...
- stupandaus 14y agoBeyond being impressed by Taobao's scale, I would caution HN readers not to fall into the trap of thinking about China as a monolithic unit. Assuming that China is homogenous is just as foolish as assuming America is homogenous. Taobao's success is also tied to their ability to understand the drastic cultural differences between different areas of the country, and understanding how to market to these "countries within a country." If you are unfamiliar with China, I would highly suggest reading about Patrick Chovanec's "Nine Nations of China." 1. http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of-china/ http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of... 2. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-nine-nations-of-china/307769/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-nine...
- dangerboysteve 14y agoI find this story to be complete BS. I find it hard to believe this much volume in one day from one site and everything worked like a charm. The payments gateways worked flawlessly? I think this is just a publicity stunt to drive traffic.
- NieJohn 14y agou r totally wrong!The payments gateways is fine！The technical skills of alibaba is beyond your imagination.Taobao has their own database called OceanBase,in that day,this database load more than 1.5 billion visit and the alipay(支付宝) finish 100 billion deal!
- beret595 14y agohi,guys.I am Beijing.It's really interesting to see your comments. There are always something exist in this earth ,your do not know .haha
- xhnwsw520 14y agoThanks for paying attention on taobao~~~~
- anysql 14y agoShare some data from alipay DB system, for the core payment database, total 4 billion transaction processed, 28 billion SQLs are executed, and 193 billion memory data blocks are touched, and 1.3 billion physical disk read only.
- guanggun 14y ago操，能说明中国的光棍太多了么？ Fuck, may I say that Chinese has so many single man? 还得注册！！！
- nameisexists 14y ago微博观光团飘过...
- ch_ch 14y ago来自天朝淘宝店主的问候！