China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu

Taobao and Baidu finally started their battle in late 2008.
Alibaba group’s Taobao is well known as the number one C2C site with Alipay being the first choice online payment mechanism in China. However, Baidu entered the C2C competition by launching Youa with Baifubao as the payment mechanism.

Taobao started by blocking Baidu’s spider from indexing [...]

Koubei.com Merges with Yahoo China

Koubei.com is to merge with Yahoo China (cn.yahoo.com), one of the web properties owned by China’s largest Internet company Alibaba group. The popular Hangzhou based site Koubei.com is a life community which mainly focuses on classifieds related to real estate property renting, local restaurants, and entertainment venues.
The merge with Koubei.com is believed to enhance Yahoo’s [...]

Chinese Websites Go Black and White

The major Chinese websites turned the main theme (colour) of their home pages into black and white today for the memories of victims who died in the earthquake on 12 May 2008. Sites participated in the mourning include search engines like Baidu, Google China, and Yahoo China, portals such as Sina and Sohu, and China’s [...]

Google and Sina Ready To Compete Against Baidu?

Google and Sina announced a partnership in China last week. In short,

Google will power Sina’s natural search results, which will allow Google to gain search market share in China. According to iResearch, Google’s web search market share in China was 18.1% which was behind baidu’s 66.3% in December 2006.
In return, Sina will become paid search [...]

Yahoo China Launches Group

Yahoo! China recently launched a BBS (bulletin board system) community called Yahoo! Club. Many believe this product is the Mainland Chinese localized version of Yahoo! Groups. With this new product I believe Yahoo! China can better service and customize to the needs of the Chinese Internet population.
BBS is very popular in China, as a social [...]

Skype Launches SkypeFind Service

Skype launched a new product called SkypeFind not long ago, which is embedded in its latest version 3.1.0.152.

At the first glance, SkypeFind is an online local yellow page service that will help users to easily find contact numbers and addresses of local businesses, such as hotels in Shanghai, and restaurants in Beijing.

Interestingly, Skype seems to [...]

Taobao Introduces Refund System

China’s largest customers-to-customers site Taobao.com rolled out a refund system last week, hoping it will reduce fraudulent activities from dishonest online sellers and reduce the risks for online buyers. The system is to enforce all sellers to submit a mandatory deposit before selling. This deposit will be refunded to buyers in the case where sellers [...]

Taobao Dominates Chinese Online Payment Market

Alibaba’s customer-to-customer site Taobao has recently dominated the individual online user transaction market in China, with almost 80% of market share. With more and more Chinese Internet users making their ways in utilizing online shopping, we are seeing higher online transaction volumes each day on Taobao.
In December 2006, the daily spend of Chinese consumers on [...]

eBay China Employees Fighting Against Agreement Deal to TOM Online

A problem has arisen recently with eBay, which has signed an agreement with TOM Online on 20 December 2006 for a joint venture agreement in China. According to the agreement, the 2 companies will combine expertise and a joint investment to build a new China marketplace mainly for mobile operations and electronic commerce. The new [...]

eBay Joining Forces With TOM Online

eBay, the world’s largest online auction site, is to close its Chinese operations after almost 5 years of participartion and announced that it is starting a 49 -51 joint venture with Tom Online Inc of Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in Asia. eBay will invest $40 million for the 49% stake, while Tom Online, with [...]

keep looking »