Alibaba on a mission: Taking on eBay

[mandy]

Consumer-to-consumer e-commerce company Alibaba, of which Yahoo Inc assumed 40% ownership in August, will continue to consolidate control of YahooChina's search, portal and other assets in the coming weeks.

Alibaba is also focusing on expanding the market share of its core e-commerce business, anchored by the popular Taobao auction site.

Insiders assert that a surprising portion of eBay users, in fact, frequently complete e-commerce transactions using Taobao and its associated e-payment platform AliPay after initially locating products for sale on eBay.

full article: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.as...8E36B25%7D&siteid=google

[bargainbloodhound]

Insiders assert that a surprising portion of eBay users, in fact, frequently complete e-commerce transactions using Taobao and its associated e-payment platform AliPay after initially locating products for sale on eBay.

That wouldn't surprise me since Taobao is free and AliPay's rates are lower than PayPal's.

the popular Taobao auction site.

You could call it that.  Here's the latest 1-week traffic numbers (from Alexa) for the 3 largest Chinese auction sites (PaiPai has only been open a few weeks)

Traffic Ranking (lower numbers are better): Taobao 16 eBay Eachnet 50 PaiPai 591
Reach per million Internet users (higher is better here): Taobao 16,300 eBay Eachnet 9,000 PaiPai 1,260
Page Views Per Visitor: Taobao 16 eBay Eachnet 7.3 PaiPai 6.1

Now you see why eBay China stopped breaking out its numbers for the press earlier in the year.