In this article I'm not going to discuss those basic questions such as "how to buy from taobao", "how to make the payment", "must you be a member", or "Could you introduce me some of the good sites that you shopped in". You may always refer to sea.taobao.com for basic questions guidance with perfect illustrations if you really want to shop with taobao. It saves you more time than asking in any blogger site. I'm not advertising any seller or re-seller or agent here, I'd like to talk about some truth behind this brilliant online platform and how it may impact on you.
If you followed taobao.com before 2013, you could see taobao has made some progress in entering overseas market. Apart from pasting adv on taxi in Singapore, they changed taobao.com to sea.taobao.com and created some of the pages in English. However, this overseas market covers Singapore and Malaysia only, excluding Hong Kong or Taiwan as most of people there can read Chinese although taobao officially may include these 2 regions.
Here comes the first problem people always discuss "What’s not good about Taobao?"
1) Everything is in Chinese.
Definitely all English based bloggers will mention this point and whoever mentioned this implies your Chinese is sucks although you are Chinese.
Why doesn't taobao provide English version. Some of my local friends asked me this questions before. When I saw them searching keyword in English in taobao search engine, I felt like laughing. (Of course some English keywords are working such as ukulili or ukulele.) The answer is simple. They don't need English buyers to contribute to their sales. In 2014 dual 11 (nov. 11th) event, Taobao and Tmall sales record hit 57.1 billion just in one day. How does it make sense to you? Any other online platform can compare?
2) Tmall has no online customer service
Yes, just now I mentioned Tmall, "What is Tmall?" (seldom blogger mentioned this, I know you never notice it.)
It's all about history story. In 2008, taobao B2C new platform Taobao Mall was published. Wenchuan earthquake donation online platform was published and it raised a total of over 20 million contributed by online users. In September same year, taobao monthly turnover broke through billions. On January 11th 2012, Taobao Mall officially changed its name to Tmall which was split into different companies from taobao company under Alibaba Group. Different companies have different rules and regulations and this is where raises more problem to users. (not mentioning detail here)
Yet we still talk about taobao and tmall as an united group since whatever keywords you searched in taobao, it will also pop up related items listed in tmall. And they use the same system to make the payment Alipay.
3) Alipay doesn't support foreign currency.
Yes, another term was mentioned Alipay. "What is Alipay?". Simply speaking, taobao and alipay is like ebay and paypal. From the image above, you can see Alipay has overseas payment page. Well, it mainly supports big banks in Singapore and Malaysia. The official website writes since 2009 , Alipay started international bank card online payment service, supporting the use of VISA, MasterCard, JCB cards for online payment in Taobao and other merchants and now covers most countries and regions.
Well, I do NOT believe this statement at all. If you really tried the Alipay payment system with taobao, you will find how sucks it is. It is an unstable system and irresponsible team. Whatever customers feedback to them, they just record down but never progress. In China mainland, it might be useful. If overseas, it's very hard to say. It is far behind paypal so far. However, their derivatives are brilliant such as Yu'ebao which I'll mention it in "What’s not good about Taobao?" later.
4) taobao sellers do not do overseas shipping.
Even Tmall as registered branded companies platform, most of them never do overseas shipping. If some of them do, then the prices may be dramatically high. Moreover, most of the sellers do not even know taobao has overseas business. That's funny. One platform dare to do overseas business but never educate their sellers. Then "how can overseas buyers receive items from taobao".
Lucky they provide parcel forwarding services now. There are only 3 official companies working with taobao, so you can imagine how busy they are and how long one overseas buyer could get reply if he/she has any enquiry to ask. Taobao suggest to use these official forwarders as users can trace the status of items in taobao website and they are normally responsible for any loss and damage. For unofficial forwarders, there are a lot. 'You must deal with them on your own risk' said taobao customer service.
Taobao has comment system for these forwarders companies as well. If you only read those terrible bad reviews, you may not want to choose anyone of them. I do have good and bad experience with them, yet it seems all depend on luck.
5) user system for overseas buyers is not up to standard!
If you taobao don't care about overseas buyers at all, people may think this is such a damn awesome or arrogant platform. However, since you taobao advertised in Singapore and Malaysia, means you keen on overseas market. But if you keen on overseas market yet still not improve or cater for overseas buyers, it shows your low capability or irresponsibility.
It's known to all that default waiting time is 10 days after sellers click post out. Overseas surfaces shipping normally take 2 weeks including clear customs and delivery to door. And the timing from seller to shipping company warehouse is 3-5 days. How about the delay. How about the gathering and double checking the goods. All may need extra time. Hence, 10 days is not enough at all for overseas buyers.
After butting in so many weakness of Taobao, let's look at some bright side "What’s good about Taobao?"
1. Various product with competitive low prices
2. Tao coin everyday which can be used to offset some cash.
3. YueBao's brilliant function and return.
Although Yuebao introduces itself as funds, most mainland users consider it as a savings account. It doesn't guarantee any return, however, the performance is not bad.
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