Thursday, September 23, 2010

For discussion: Problems faced by Taobao.com

Even though Taobao is known to be a primary online shopping destination for the largest online population in the world but unfortunately China has been facing problems as well. This includes 4000 fake Taobao websites were found to be closed in July 2010.  According to the APAC (Anti-Phishing Alliance of China) mentioning that the number of phishing website report in the first seven months of 2010 was more than double compared with the entire year of 2009. The most interesting part is that Taobao.com, Tencent’s qq.com and the website of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China which most imitated by phishing websites, accounting for over 90% of the total reports. 

                       How can you tell whether this product is real or fake?
                      This is one of the example taken from the Taobao.com website.

The China Internet information security report published by APAC in March 2010 showed that over 90% Chinese negtizens encountered phishing websites mainly via emails and instant messaging in 2009. This could affect many people and it would increase huge problems about security issues. Therefore, chinese negtizens would not trust the website but also hindered the healthy development of the Internet in China.

China has now becoming so serious and took action for those users who sell fake websites will be terminated. Taobao.com’s move comes after a shop owner registered on the website was found selling fake products of famous brands such as LV and Dunhill. Those fake products will be confiscated by the commerce department of Haidian District, Beijing.  Till now, the case has been transferred for further investigation. According to this program, if products sold through Taobao.com have quality problems, the website will help the sellers to return the payments for the goods to consumers in advance, shortening the period of waiting for the returned money.


                                                                 
                                                                 FAKE LV WATCH









Taobao.com has just released a blacklist of fake good sellers. This shows that many highly ranked sellers are cheating buyers by taking advantage of their high credit index.Taobao.com has already close the accounts of selected sellers with many netizens posting messages in online forums that they do not trust this website anymore. It would make people to think twice when they want to do online shopping. When posting goods online in Taobao.com website, sellers and buyers are ranked based on their trustworthiness and ability to deliver as advertised products. A person surnamed He was mentioning that sellers just use different members names to make good comment about themselves in order to obtain high ranking.

Apart from that, Taobao.com is enforcing new rules to punish illegal online behavior. The first rule states that the company will remove any counterfeit goods from its website after receiving complaint letters from brand owners. The second rule will be owners of online stores that are closed will not be allowed to open new stores at Taobao.com for 3-5 years. Lastly, the new rule about setting a price limit for each kind of good saying that goods that are priced very cheap will be placed under observation.

After reading this, would you still consider yourself buying goods online from Taobao.com website? If there is any information related to this website, please comment back. Thanks


List of references:

China tech news.com 2006, Taobao.com announces fake goods blacklist, viewed 24 September 2010.http://www.chinatechnews.com/2006/07/31/4184-taobaocom-announces-fake-goods-blacklist

China tech news.com 2006, Taobao.com Chinese users who sell fake products will be terminated http://www.chinatechnews.com/2009/02/10/8742-taobaocom-chinese-users-who-sell-fake-products-will-be-terminated

Posted by Fiona at 8:50 PM

2 comments:

  1. Ding Shi HuiOctober 8, 2010 at 9:46 AM

    Hello Edith & Fiona,

    Wow! I was surprised to see the numbers of fake Taobao websites as mentioned in your blogs.

    Anyway, I think Taobao.com still can enhance its position in the China market through several ways. The fundamental way to increase the online sales is to make the consumers feel more comfortable when shopping online which is also one of the main reasons of $36.6 billion online shopping revenues in China, 2009. It is also recommended that some free services like free account registration or free customer service offered in order to attract more consumers especially China consumers to migrate to Taobao.com just like the strategy used by Sina.com and Sohu.com (Olsen 2010).

    Moreover, there were also plenty of trust issues in regards to the false goods or products information. But here comes the solution with the third-party payment system called Alipay and the acceptance of credit cards is helping to resolve those issues. How? The Alipay that is owned by Alibaba, has a similar approach with PayPal with the only difference is that Alipay does not release payment until the item is received by the buyers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ding Shi HuiOctober 8, 2010 at 9:47 AM

    Additionally, Tabao should target its website more on younger buyers. This is because according to the China Market Research Group, the major China’s e-commerce growth is driven by the buyers who ages between 13 and 28 and spend 20 hours a week online on average. The Tabao also can encourage China people to do online transaction by promoting more sellers to seek for economic opportunity in high demand Tabao’s digital market. This not only can attract individual seller to sell at Tabao, but also the seller or retailer to do online business through Tabao.






    References:
    China Market Research Group 2010, China Market Research Group, viewed 8 October 2010, http://www.cmrconsulting.com.cn/

    Chinese E-Commerce Tops $38.5 Billion; What Comes Next? 2010, Read Write Web, viewed 7 October 2010, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/chinese_e-commerce_tops_385_billion_what_comes_next.php

    Olsen, R 2010, China's Migration To E-Commerce, Forbes.com, viewed 7 October 2010, http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/18/china-internet-commerce-markets-equities-alibaba.html

    Taobao.com 2010, Taobao.com, viewed 7 October 2010, http://www.taobao.com/

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)