Preserve FREE Taobao services

Last week, Alibaba group’s on-line auction unit, Taobao.com, delivered two major messages to her users:

• Taobao will continue to provide free services to her users 
• Alibaba group plans to inject RMB 5 billions in Taobao over the next five years  in order to build its business

Jonathan Lu, president of Taobao, stated in an issued press release, “The CNY5 billion investment into the Taobao ecosystem demonstrates our long-term confidence in the Chinese economy, our optimism for China’s domestic consumption and our commitment towards creating job opportunities for entrepreneurs who harness the power of the Taobao marketplace.”

In face of challenge from Baidu and Tencent, Taobao has been stepping up its effort to  improve its B2C services by releasing http://i.mall.taobao.com, a stripped-down site optimized for Apple ipod users to browse and search products

It’s widely believed that Baidu‘s latest attempt to give a big push to her new C2C e-commerce platform, Youa.com will be taken as a threat. Renowned China search engine Baidu also beta tests BaiFuBao as her payment gateway. At this moment, Aliuser still cannot find any details on how this BaiFuBao will be functioned, what is the payment flow, fee structure and the cap on financed amounts.

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