China 101
Taobao
淘宝
Alibaba's vast consumer marketplace, founded in 2003, where millions of merchants sell essentially everything and much of Chinese online shopping culture was invented.
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 Alipay'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' Day 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 Pinduoduo on price and Douyin 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.