Search for “Taobao agent” on Google and you will see buying from Taobao is becoming more and more popular. Actually, many websites and blogs are talking about Taobao and their unbelievable number of users and the turnover increasing drastically every year.
As for us, at the very beginning before Parcel Up (Taobao FOCUS), we started to help our friends who wanted to buy some good cheap products from China. Later on, we had friends of our friends asking for help to buy from China at those cheap markets like Qi Pu Lu (euh, some years ago there was no Taobao yet :). Then the great mind of Jack Ma, together with Alibaba.com had an idea to launch a C2C platform to offer millions of people the possibility to buy products at cheapest price all around China. And Taobao was born.
Taobao is an online marketplace facilitating transactions between individual consumers and large number of sellers, such as retailers, wholesalers or other individual sellers. Essential point in Taobao model is that nearly all services for sellers and buyers are free of charge. From the very beginning, the free access to the service gained a great popularity among Chinese people. Furthermore, most of sellers tend to put the lowest possible price to stay in line with competition; every day it attracts more and more consumers looking for low price.
Advantages to buy from Taobao
Probably the most amazing fact about Taobao.com is the number of people selling and buying online through this website. Thousands of sellers offer a large choice of products with nearly unlimited range of items to buy from Taobao. Shopping on Taobao.com became a part of life style for many Chinese people. And it is quite easy to understand, as you can find on the website all products from daily use items and food to some very sophisticated products that are not that easy to find elsewhere. For foreigners, Taobao is a place for “discount shopping” and a gold mine for products related to Asian / Chinese culture, tradition and interior, you can buy these items from Taobao at the lowest price.
Actually, Taobao is not only C2C platform as it is usually mentionned: behind many individual people selling online, there are even more companies selling to consumers through Taobao Mall. Thus, at Taobao Mall you can buy products delivered directly from factories without any intermediary cost; this particularly concerns clothes and electronics, but not limited to these industries.
You probably know that Chinese people are very creative and have a good imagination. Taobao also knows it and make a good business by providing a dedicated section of website to creative, unique and hand-made products. Taobao calls it “Creative Station”.
Now you have some ideas about why to buy from Taobao and in our next post we will tell you more about Taobao.com.