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 its millions of web pages. Take a look at the content of Taobao.com’s Robots.txt file:
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /
User-agent: baiduspider
Disallow: /
or access the file via your browser:
http://www.taobao.com/robots.txt
Run a site search on Baidu for Taobao.com and it returns only 2 results:
- Taobao’s member sign-in page
- Taobao’s B2C site: Taobao Mall Beta
Besides disappearing from Baidu’s natural search results, both Taobao and Alibaba stopped all advertising on Baidu PPC. Once both companies were on the list of biggest spenders of Baidu.
Earlier, Taobao merged with Alimama, and Koubei.com also merged with Yahoo China.
By launching Youa, Baidu lost the big PPC advertising revenue used to be generated from the Alibaba group. Baidu is also fighting an uphill battle to catch up with Taobao in China’s C2C market. The success may really depend on how well Baidu leverages from its large existing user base. Besides, Baidu also provides Chinese C2C users easy ways to import their products directly from Taobao to Youa.
For the Alibaba group, both Alibaba and Taobao are missing large search traffic volume that was used to be generated from Baidu. To make up the lost of traffic, the Alibaba group really has to work on improving Yahoo China in hoping this search engine will start gaining search market share in China.
Related Information:
- Baidu PPC
- How Baidu and Google China Ended 2008
- Taobao embargo Baidu
- Baidu E-commerce Platform is Finally Online
- Baidu Ranked Third in Asia Pacific Search Market
- Baidu Position 10 PPC ad
- Koubei.com Merging with Yahoo China
- China PPC Strategies
- Baidu Huobao Text Ads
- 5 Popular Baidu Vertical Projects
- Baidu PPC Algorithm Changes
Posted on December 2, 2008
Filed Under China Internet | 7 Comments
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Very interesting post! It’s a pity baidu.com doesn’t have an english version. As European unfortunately you’re lost on the Chinese internet.
[...] Baidu entered China’s C2C battle to compete with Alibaba group’s Taobao.com by launching its C2C site Youa.Baidu.com. Shortly afterwards, Taobao.com stopped all its advertisements from appearing on Baidu and disabled itself from being indexed by Baidu.com. Baidu’s Youa countered by providing users easy tools to automatically export all their product data from Taobao and other C2C sites to Youa. [...]
[...] China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu [...]
[...] China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu [...]
[...] China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu [...]
[...] China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu [...]
[...] China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu [...]