电子商务案例2011-淘宝

1、三年免费。淘宝推出时提出了三年免费服务的策略，而在淘宝迅速取得巨大成功时仍然维持承诺，从淘宝的观点看，他们认为会员并不一定在乎那点会员费，但淘宝失去的将是企业的信誉。

2、与B2B平台对接。淘宝利用其特有的优势将C2C业务与阿里巴巴的B2B业务对接，个体卖主可以从B2B平台上批量采购，然后通过淘宝的C2C平台实现零售，为客户带来了极大的方便。

3、支付宝。支付宝(alipay.com)是阿里巴巴推出的又一拳头产品，它在很大程度上解决了国内电子商务一直面临的电子支付问题，在电子商务领域，其市场占有额达到了90%。

4、安全服务。首先在注册上采取更严格的实名制认证，提供“淘宝旺旺”即时交易沟通工具，应用“诚信通”工具评测客户的诚信，制定严格的交易流程和交易规章。淘宝采取了这样一系列措施尽可能地保障了交易的安全。

5、其他服务。目录管理服务保障了客户商品的正确分类，与快递公司建立战略伙伴既保障了交易的递送效率，还降低了客户的物流成本。

淘宝的一系列营销策略迅速使其成为国内最著名的C2C网站，从2003年网站发布不到一年，其访问流量就达到了易趣的四倍以上，注册会员也在2005年超过了易趣，2006年初易趣的市场份额已不到淘宝网的1/2。按照阿里巴巴总裁马云的话说，他拿着望远镜也看不到对手。

思考题：

(1)淘宝网采用了哪些营销策略击败了其竞争对手？ (2)进入淘宝网(taobao.com)，试着开一个小商店。

(3)进入支付宝(alipay.com)，试着注册一个支付宝账户。

扩展问题：

（1）你对弹出式广告持有什么样的态度？对广告拦截工具持什么态度？

（2）淘宝网的诚信通对你的购买决策会不会产生影响？你如何看待网络口碑对消费者购买行为的影响？

Ebay Eachnet loses out to Taobao

By Liu Baijia (China Daily) Updated: 2006-05-10 08:57

Shares in US online auction giant eBay fell in China over the past year as its competitor Taobao.com claimed more of the country's online trading market, according to a China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) report released yesterday.

CNNIC said in the report that eBay Eachnet, the Chinese arm of the US firm, took almost 30 per cent of the market share in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, while its local competitor Taobao, partly held by Yahoo!, grabbed two thirds of the pie, based on the number of active registered traders and the frequency of their transactions last year.

Paipai.com, under the largest Chinese instant messaging service provider Tencent.com, had a market share of 2.2 per cent with the strongest growth, while 1pai.com, a former joint venture between Yahoo! and a Chinese counterpart and now part of Taobao, took only 1.4 per cent.

CNNIC, a semi-official organization, monitors Internet traffic and releases half-yearly reports on the development of the Web in China; this is the first time it has released a report on the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce market.

Although buyers in the three cities accounted for less than 20 per cent of the total in the country, they bought almost 40 per cent of goods. Sellers in these cities sold around half of the goods, despite the fact that they accounted for fewer than a third of the country's total traders.

The report said more than 2 million people in the three cities traded on C2C websites last year. And almost 20 per cent of all Internet users in Shanghai bought or sold goods on C2C websites, while the ratios in Beijing and Guangzhou were 17.5 per cent and 11.5 per cent.

\"The shift of the leadership from eBay Eachnet to Taobao took place mainly in 2005,\" said Peter Lu, senior consultant with CNNIC.

According to the report, half of the traders on Taobao registered last year and 64 per cent of sellers and 56 per cent of buyers trading both on Taobao and eBay Eachnet were registered with eBay Eachnet in 2004 before they migrated to Taobao.

Ebay Eachnet has experienced slower growth compared to its rivals due to increased competition, its service charges, lack of online chat software before 2005 and slower log-on speed.

Over 60 per cent of survey respondents said they would buy more frequently on Taobao, while almost 40 per cent preferred eBay Eachnet, according to the report. Two thirds of respondents said they would recommend trading on C2C websites to their friends and relatives.

In contrast to the Ebay machine Taobao and Alibaba are vintage dot-com. Young Chinese hipsters

in blue jeans sit at open desks beneath posters that say: \"Pay any price, do anything, to WIN!\" Last year Ma staged a fifth-anniversary bash, in an arena, for all 2,000 employees, with Taobaoists waving flags of worker ants, the mascot of Taobao--because enough ants united can defeat an elephant. The four-hour event ended with everyone holding hands and singing a song with the lyrics \"You have to go through a thunderstorm to see a rainbow\"--a reference to the dot-com bust and the dark days of the SARS virus scare as Taobao launched in mid-2003. Then they went disco dancing late into the night, climbing on the bar--Ma among them.

Ebay charges its sellers to list their goods on the world-beating site, while Taobao got its fast start because selling there is free. The Alibaba sites, meanwhile, offer basic service free of charge but rake in revenue from 85,000 members, who pay $250 to $10,000 a year for extra services such as personalized Web pages and accreditation.

Ebay's success in China may even help Alibaba. Dozens or hundreds of Ebay sellers in China are cheaply sourcing goods from Ma's Alibaba site, then resell-ing the items at a profit, says Jason Brueschke, a sell-side analyst with Pacific Growth Equities in San Francisco. \"As Ebay gets stronger, it helps Alibaba,\" he says. \"[Ebay] can't just buy its way into China,\" he warns, adding that Jack Ma started the Taobao site as \"a firewall on the consumer side against Ebay coming after Alibaba.\"

Ma admits as much, but he hopes to create better links between his Alibaba and Taobao outlets, with Taobao sellers trading with Alibaba patrons and vice versa to create a global platform to rival Ebay. Setting up Taobao \"was defensive at first,\" he says. \"But now we are going after them.\"

OutFront

Standing Up to Ebay

Justin Doebele, 04.18.2005

Ebay aims to conquer China. Jack Ma's local heroes are doing handstands to repel the American invasion.

Ebay has conquered online auctioning, racking up $778 million in profit last year on a transaction volume of $34 billion. But Ebay won't stay on top unless it also conquers what eventually will be the world's largest market for online goods:China. Ebay bought its way into China in 2002, holds half of a $1 billion market and will spend $100 million this year to bolster its presence there. China is a \"must win\" and \"is likely to be the defining measure of business success on the Net,\" Ebay Chief Meg Whitman told Wall Street analysts in early February. \"A bunch of small competitors are nipping at our heels.\"

Jack Ma is more than a mere ankle-biter. Ma runs the Taobao consumer auction site, the biggest homegrown rival to Ebay in China. Though it didn't start up until a year after Ebay arrived, Taobao quickly has gobbled up 41% of online auction sales, compared with Ebay's 53%; it has 4 million registered users, gaining on Ebay's claim of 10 million customers in the country. To take on the decidedly American presence of Ebay, Taobao--Mandarin for \"searching for treasure\"--plays up its local staff and an all-China focus; its online moderators use screen names from characters in famous Chinese kung fu novels.

Ma also runs Alibaba, which claims to be the world's largest global business-to-business auction site. Six million members use the main site, devoted to in-China trade, and a second site for trade with companies in the rest of the world. Alibaba and Taobao, which are controlled by Ma's Alibaba Holdings, aim to fence out Ebay, setting themselves up for expansion beyond China's borders. If JackMa has his way, Taobao--not Ebay--will end up conquering the online world.

\"We want to be the world's largest consumer site,\" Ma says in Taobao's (and Alibaba's) office in Hangzhou, two hours' drive south of Shanghai.

Toppling Ebay is a bold (if not suicidal) ambition, and Ma tells his staff it requires a new perspective. Ebay looks less fearsome when you're upside down, he argues, so new employees are encouraged to learn how to do a handstand. Ebay, with $3.3 billion a year in revenue (compared with a mere $68 million at Ma's company), expects overseas revenue to eclipse U.S. revenue in two years. It now is the dominant auction site in Germany, France and Australia, crushing local rivals or buying them; it leads in Korea and Singapore; and it just launched in Malaysia, the Philippines and India. Potential future markets: Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

But Ebay's Whitman says China is top priority. China's population of Net users, likely to surpass 100 million this year, is second only to that of the U.S. and may double in two years. Taobao and

Ebay \"are fighting tooth and nail,\" says Victor Koo, who runs China portal Sohu. \"If Ebay wants to be a global consumer site, it needs China.\"

Ma says Ebay thrives elsewhere but still may falter in China. \"Ebay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose--but if we fight in the river, we win.\"

Ma is aNet star at home. To other Chinese Internet pioneers he is known respectfully as \"Grandfather,\" having formed China's first Internet company in 1995, about the time Jeff Bezos was starting Amazon.com in the U.S. (Inside Alibaba, Ma's nickname is less formal:\"Feng Qing Yang,\" a wise kung fu master; at 40 he is one of the oldest Alibabers.)

Jack Ma grew up as one of three children in a family in Hangzhou, his mother working on an assembly line making clocks and his father running a dramatic arts association. Young Jack grew up meeting performers and to this day is something of a performer himself. By age 13, eager to learn English and hear about the world outside China, he would hang out at a tourist hotel and offer free guided tours to foreign guests; this he did until age 21. \"A lot of people thought I was very strange,\" he says.

By 1988 he was teaching English to engineering students, and in 1995 he made his first trip to the U.S., as an interpreter for a trade delegation. He visited friends in Seattle and learned about the Internet; he did an online search for \"beer\" and got back dozens of responses, then searched \"China\"--and got back nothing. Sensing a big opportunity, he returned to China, quit his teaching job, borrowed $2,000 and started one of China's first Web sites, a directory service for Chinese businesses seeking overseas orders. The government shut it down in 1997 in an anti-Internet crackdown but loosened up two years later.

So in 1999 Ma tried again, raising $25 million from Goldman Sachs, Softbank and others to form Alibaba, which today clears $5 billion a year in transactions (Ebay's size in 2000).

Ebay entered China in 2002 by paying $30 million for a one-third stake in Eachnet, an auction site set up three years earlier by Harvard graduate Yibo Shao and a partner. A year later Ebay bought the rest of Eachnet for $150 million, keeping on its chief, Shao. He vows that Ebay Eachnet, as the site is known, will win: \"There can be only one big [consumer auction] site in China.\"

Ma countered by teaming up with Masayoshi Son's Softbank of Japan to launch the Taobao consumer site for $56 million. He picked the ideal partner:Son had beaten back Ebay in Japan by taking an early lead in auctions with his Yahoo Japan joint venture. Ebay closed its Japan site in early 2002.

\"We were both thinking the same thing:Son kicked Ebay out of Japan. I have the same chance in China,\" Ma says. \"Ebay doesn't think we are a threat. China will be a worse defeat than Japan.\" His swagger rankles some observers. Last year Ma gave a presentation on his grand scheme to half a dozen Wall Street types, and one of them stalked out midway through the pitch, with a

parting shot:\"Ebay will win!\"

But so far not a single Western Web site has succeeded in China. AOL in 1999 launched a $200 million joint venture with China's biggest PCmaker, Legend Computer (now called Lenovo). Three years later AOLsold out, and Legend switched to a local telecom partner. All the top sites in China are homegrown: Sina for portals, Shanda for games and, in search, Baidu, which is about to go public. Yahoo is an also-ran in the market; its auction site, 1pai.com, runs a distant third to Ebay and Taobao.

In addition to the $100 million spending spree that Ebay plots this year, it spent an undisclosed sum to sign exclusive deals with China's three largest portals (Sina, Sohu and Netease) to block Taobao ads from those sites. (Sohu and Sina have since dropped the exclusives). \"They are doing everything they can to block us,\" says Ma. Ebay also is plastering ads all over China, on subway platforms and buses. \"They have deep pockets, but we will cut a hole in their pocket,\" Ma jokes.

Ebay has stumbled since scaling the Great Wall. Last year it overhauled the Eachnet site to comply with Ebay's worldwide format. The design change confused some customers, and product listings plunged--down to 250,000 from 780,000 before the switch. Ebay lost some fans last May, when it changed the rules about how sellers can limit their buying audience. \"Many power sellers left Ebay to go to Taobao,\" says Ebay power seller Wang Yun, who remains loyal to the site. Ebay denies it.

Chen Zhuoyuan started selling clothes from Wuxi, China over Ebay's site a year ago but quit after a week because of technical problems, switching to Taobao. \"The trades are bigger,\" she says. Ebay also lags behind in offering its PayPal payment system in China, while Ma launched his own version, Alipay, in January. And the online giant has been shuffling local management, keeping Shao as chairman but assigning a new chief executive officer.

\"Taobao didn't win the first battle, but Ebay lost it,\" Ma maintains.

Taobao uses guerrilla marketing to keep up with Ebay's might. The China site advertises on the cheap on hundreds of small Web outlets ignored by Ebay. Taobao is the eighth most popular site in China, ahead of Ebay at number 13, according to Alexa, an Internet traffic monitor. An Ebay spokesman argues Taobao's guerrilla tactics artificially inflate its ranking because pop-up ads for Taobao on other sites count as \"visitors\" to Taobao itself. \"It's like saying a person seeing your billboard has visited your store,\" says Shao. Ma says he is phasing out that practice--with no visible drop-off in Taobao's Alexa ranking.