Taobao

Taobao is the original giant of Chinese e-commerce. Launched by Alibaba in 2003 to counter eBay in China, it won by being free for sellers and by solving trust with AlipayAnt Group's payment and lifestyle app, originally built as the escrow layer for Taobao, which together with WeChat Pay forms China's mobile payment duopoly.'s escrow. It grew into a marketplace of millions of merchants where you can buy virtually anything, from machine parts to custom wedding dresses.

Taobao is more than a store; it is a culture. It produced China's first generation of online entrepreneurs, the annual Singles' DayThe November 11 shopping festival that Alibaba turned from an unofficial student holiday into the largest retail event in the world. festival, a whole vocabulary of shopping slang, and phenomena like Taobao villages, rural communities that industrialized around online selling. Its livestream arm helped invent livestream commerce as a mainstream channel.

Today Taobao competes hard with PinduoduoThe price-first e-commerce platform that rose on group buying and farm-direct goods to challenge Alibaba and JD, and the parent of the international app Temu. on price and DouyinByteDance's Chinese version of the short-video app known internationally as TikTok, run as a separate product with its own content and e-commerce ecosystem. on content, and has folded itself into a broader Alibaba retail strategy. But as a verb, taobao still just means to shop online, and its search rankings remain a real-time map of Chinese consumer desire.