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They 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 pr
by wilfra 14y ago
They 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.
- gingerbreadman 14y agoI had the opportunity to work on a seller buyer chat for a company which attempts to be the indian taobao, turns out there is very little traction for the real-time version. That feature got removed pretty quickly. However, a craiglist like email based system between buyer and sellers which replaced the chat worked tremendously better in the Indian setup. At least from the India marketplace perspective it looks to be sometime before the same model works here. Hardly anything like Paypal in India though.