The Coming War Between Baidu and Taobao

Written by Tangos on September 30, 2008
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It is inevitable that there will be a war between Baidu C2C service and Alibaba’s Taobao when Baidu announced its C2C plan in last year. Taobao is dominating the C2C market in China, even after Tencent’s Paipai entered this market. But this time, Taobao’s rival is Baidu, which is dominating search market in China, and also has strong community services like Baidu Tieba and Baidu Zhidao.

Since Baidu is about to launch its C2C service very soon, actually the war between Baidu and Taobao has begun already. Taobao has blocked Baidu spiders to crawl and index its content, though Taobao claimed it is to eliminate fraud caused by ill-intentioned merchants who gain consumers trust by paid listing and SEO on Baidu. At the same time, Alibaba merged Alimama service into Taobao, and encourage Taobao merchants to use Alimama’s ads network to promote their shops.

Now Baidu released a tool for Baidu C2C’s users, which can help them to export all items data from their shops on other C2C platform, of course, mainly from Taobao, and upload to Baidu’s platform. It just take several minutes. It significantly reduce the cost for a big seller to try Baidu’s platform. The sellers have built their sales records and credit points on Taobao for years, maybe Baidu will also acknowledge sellers’ credit points on Taobao, eBay Eachnet has tried to do similar things in early this year.

It is just the beginning, and it is possibly the most interesting competition in China’s web in recent years. Let’s wait for it.

4 Responses to “The Coming War Between Baidu and Taobao”

  1. Fabian Perez on October 10th, 2008 11:21 am

    I don’t think Baidu’s Mall will eat Taobao, in fact I believe that Taobao will continue being #1. Baidu from my point of view, even they offer very interesting stuff, is losing trustability day after day because the self bumping and manipulation.

  2. Taobao Improves Product Search Interface : China Web2.0 Review on January 8th, 2009 11:12 am

    [...] September, Taobao banned Baidu’s search spider to access its content. Apparently it believes an in-site search will be more beneficial to its [...]

  3. Frog on January 8th, 2009 9:30 pm

    ALL I SEE THAT WE CUSTOMERS WILL BENEFITE FROM THIS COMPETITION

  4. A Brief History (and Future) of Alibaba.com | China Web 2.0 and Asia Tech News, Open Web Asia on January 23rd, 2009 2:10 am

    [...] in the coming years it will be hard for Taobao to keep its market share of around 76 percent. The biggest threat comes from Baidu who has announced to enter the online C2C market in 2008 to compete with Alibaba’s Taobao, the [...]

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