TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

Quote:Work begins each day with a click of a mouse for 25-year-old graduate Jing Jing, an assumed name.

Her world is filled with the sort of buzzwords that send technophobes round the bend - like e-commerce, C2C (customer-to-customer) retail and SOHO - Small-Office / Home-Office.

Instead of getting a so-called proper job when she graduated, Jing Jing decided to start up a little shop on the Internet.

The Beijinger makes an average of 2,500 yuan (US$308) a month selling clothes and cosmetics, and can earn up to 8,000 yuan (US$986) when business is booming...

Quote:Being your own boss is becoming much easier these days, at least in the cyber world. And a growing number of urban Chinese are starting businesses on the Internet.

Lured by almost free entry into the market and the prospect of earning money while working at home, the number of online merchants is growing fast. And many don't even care if their ventures succeed.

These business owners especially women are finding their online shops in this digital age open up a world of freedom that they would not have in the normal working world...

At one of the online entrepreneurs' favourite websites, www.taobao.com, there are 300,000 shops selling almost everything under the sun, and more than half of them opened after January 1, 2005, according to Tao Ran, the website's public relations manager.

At www.ebay.com.cn, the Chinese subsidiary of New York-based eBay.com, the number of online shops has reached more than 60,000, which is about three times more than at the beginning of 2005, said Liu Wei, its public relations manager...