April 2013 Updates

Lots of action in the Taobao Universe since our last update. Lots of things changed, moved, or otherwise touched inappropriately by the Taobao UI team. Our latest Taobao Field Guide updates seek to bring the planets back into alignment.

What’s New

One big thing to be aware of is that Taobao now requires a Chinese mobile phone number to validate your member registration. Our Field Guides are primarily for expats in China, so this should not be a problem for most. If you are outside of China – please refer to one of our Taobao Agents for help! They are great people, who we support 200%.

If you are a new Taobao user, check them out!

On August 24th, Fashion brand Björn Borg announced they would be entering the Chinese market, with a store online on Taobao, and a physical store in Shanghai. In fact, BB began promoting their brand months earlier on Weibo, building their brand story and connecting to the fans that were already talking about their brand.

Weibo + Taobao as a market entry strategy is picking up steam among foreign brands looking for a effective way to quickly start building their brand in China. (We personally think that the retail outlet won’t be useful for them, and some experts agree.)  This is an analysis on what Bjorn Borg is doing on Weibo and Taobao, and the lessons we can take from them.

On Weibo

Take advantage of local trends

When the the 74-story Gate to the East in Suzhou was revealed, the popular reaction in China was that it looked like a pair of long underwear. The Bjorn Borg China social media team’s ears perked up, and they quickly took advantage of this by creating their own proposed modification to the nighttime lighting display. Accompanied by a pithy message, this one brought the brand right into the local conversation.  Point: Borg – 320 reposts.

Expand your following by running contests

Contests enable a brand to quickly expand its audience on Weibo.  Bjorn Borg ran this contest to giveaway 20 branded USB wristbands. From the contest description:

On August 30, Bjorn Borg delivered a gift bag to Lady Gaga at her concert in Helsinki. Want to know what was inside? Better to guess: 1. Follow @ BjornBorg  2. Reply with the Bjorn Borg outfit that would best suit Lady Gaga  3. Forward to three friends

This is the a popular contest format on Weibo.  And tying the contest to someone who is well-known among young people in China helped them build more interest in a key demographic.  By registering the contest with the Weibo official promotions website, they expanded their account’s visibility to a new audience. Point: Borg – 1642 contest entries, 3400+ forwards and 2500+ comments.

Cross-promotions back to Taobao

Bjorn Borg pulls people to the store with time-limited discount deals exclusive to their Taobao store.  This eye-catching grand opening launch promotion offered up to 50% off merchandise. Point Borg: 311 forwards, 85 comments

On Taobao

Bjorn Borg chooses Taobao, not Tmall

The first thing to recognize is that Bjorn Borg decided to open on Taobao, and not Tmall.  A common perception is that Tmall is a B2C platform and the only place for big brands, and Taobao is a C2C platform for small businesses.  In reality, many large companies prefer to stay on Taobao, as Tmall stores are significantly more expensive and restrictive to own and operate.   This, and the fact that Taobao and Tmall search results show up side-by-side on Taobao, further dilutes the distinction between the two platforms. When Bjorn Borg fully knows what to expect from their China ecommerce operations, they can consider the pros and cons of switching to Tmall.

Brand the JA! out of your store and product pages

Every page on Bjorn Borg’s Taobao store and product pages feature big bright branding.  This branding signals to consumers that the store is an official, premium flagship store.  Their branding features big images, and localization that mixes of Chinese, English and a sprinkling of Swedish: BJORN BORG SAYS JA TO CHINA. They also prominently feature their brand history. Their second navigation link after Home is Our Story, a page which covers Bjorn Borg’s history going back to 1956.

Go longform

This is a zoomed-out view of a single Bjorn Borg Taobao product page. You’ll notice that it is long with a lot of images: several screen-filling high-res product shots with Chinese annotations. Taobao product pages are like this – the more info the better, since most search shoppers see only your product page. Click the image below for some description of what’s going on in there.

Cross-promote with Weibo

Just like their Weibo account referenced their Taobao store, their Taobao product listings also demonstrate their good reputation on Weibo. Bjorn Borg’s popular product pages include highlighted screenshots from Weibo of people talking about their affinity for the Bjorn Borg product line.

Advantage: Borg!

The Bjorn Borg brand’s market entry activities weren’t only online, but the online components feature an strong presence on Weibo which interacts seamlessly with their own branded Taobao store. They’re doing it right, JA?

• Bjorn Borg on Weibo: http://e.weibo.com/bjornborg
• Bjorn Borg on Taobao: http://bjornborg.taobao.com/

If you want to explore the potent Weibo+Taobao combination for your own business, check out Sinafy.

Introducing BuyChina

It has been a long time since Taobao Field Guide has endorsed a Taobao Agent. There are a lot of players in this game, and very few stand out as special.

Until we met BuyChina.  This service impressed us instantly. They have a very polished shopping platform that actually makes shopping on Taobao fun for non-Chinese speakers. And they have great customer service to help seal the deal.

One of the best online ordering systems we have ever seen

We have seen many Taobao Agents implement ordering systems that seem difficult or confusing.  BuyChina has the only ordering system that has impressed us.

They have developed a robust system that shows you all the information you might want – prices, timelines and options – laid out clearly in English. It is the best implementation of an English-language Taobao system we have ever seen, and it makes shopping fun again.

You can either search for your product through the BuyChina website, or paste in the URL of the item you want.  It just works, and it works great.

The BuyChina ordering system is clean and impressive

Easy pricing and payment

Ordering is extremely easy, polished and straightforward – BuyChina takes all the guesswork out of pricing your products and shipping.  Forget the complex formulas and percentages – the ordering system tells you instantly the cost of the product, the total cost of the order with shipping, and even the discounts you can expect if you order multiple units.

They have thought of everything – they even have free shipping options if your order meets certain cost/weight criteria. They accept credit cards and other forms of payment, and all transactions are protected by VeriSign so you can feel confident that your transactions are secure.

Excellent Customer Service

In the past, we have seen Taobao Agents use complex order systems as a replacement for customer service attention. We are happy to say that’s not the case with BuyChina. They have live chat customer service that was cheerful and informative when I checked in. They also have a great FAQ and you can email them questions too.

Try Taobao Agents BuyChina.com today

Diaoyu Islands: Support the homeland, don’t give up an inch of land

The Diaoyu Controversy

The dispute over the Diaoyu Islands is hot topic all over China, and that’s true on Taobao too. The keyword 钓鱼岛 is attached to more than 26,000 product listings, including Tshirts and other products with pro-China slogans, as well as unrelated products posted by sellers who want to show their support or just catch a trending keyword.

Protect your Japanese-made products with pro-China stickers

In this now-famous image, the owner of this Toyota is protecting it from street retribution with stickers that support China. This small Taobao seller’s entire shop is now dedicated to these kinds of bumper stickers, and uses this Toyota image as a product photo to demonstrate their proper use. Some product listings look more like news reports, with images of anti-Japan events.

My car is Japanese, but my heart is Chinese

Pro-China Diaoyu Island Products - from 5rmb

Or if you want a more mild way to show support for China, you can check our earlier post about Chinese flags.

Taobao however, are on strict instructions to make such products disappear from sale. After all if it’s not yet legal to sell something in China, it’s not a great idea for one of the largest online stores in the world to be pushing them. This hasn’t stopped cunning vendors from sneaking around the culling of Diablo 3 listings.

One of the things many folks from outside China don’t know is that Chinese is extremely flexible when it comes to “sound alike” words. In fact puns, are one of the main sources of Chinese humor. This has led to the current situation of a $60 pineapple. “Dark God of Destruction” – the official name for the game in China is banned, but da boluo (pineapple) which sounds quite a lot like “Diablo” isn’t.

So unless there’s been a dramatic breakthrough in fruit and internet connections, we can assume that the $60 official version of the pineapple that works with all languages and has Asian server support – is probably Diablo 3 instead.

You won’t be surprised to learn the features of the new application. Essentially like other online shopping apps, it lets you browse (in a smartphone enabled kind of way) through the stores of Tmall and make purchases (from partners and independents alike). There are some neat social features, that let you make comments on products and “like” them. You’ll also be able to track your purchase all the way from decision to delivery, thanks to an order management plugin.

It appears that users like it, as the first 500 reviews or so on the iTunes app store gave the product 5 out of 5. It’s also a little more Western friendly than some Chinese apps, and there’s a certain minimalist appeal to the UI that’s rarely seen here given the preference for “busy” screens in general.

Android users are going to have to wait a little longer for an app, but Tmall says that the product is in the works.

So to incentivize potentially reluctant Chinese chaps to get busy ordering cool stuff, the company has announced a new delivery strategy. In one of those moments of brilliant viral marketing, Taobao has hired a host of honeys to bring products to your door step. That’s right from now on, when you buy your wife some new hair curlers – they’ll be shucked to your doorstep by a delectable young model. Well, at least they will be if you’re willing to cough up an extra 10 quai for the privilege.

It’s not clear whether the lovely ladies will be from the Tao Girls site, another Taobao owned site, where girls advertise themselves for modeling work.

Given that Taobao is the country’s 3^rd most visited site, this seems like a cunning plan to keep the traffic flowing. Of course the enormous attention the offer has garnered in China’s mainstream media can’t hurt either.

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in China’s Tier 1 cities, anyone who is anyone has the latest Apple or Samsung handset artfully kept in view. That’s because there’s a certain prestige to be had from owning the latest in-demand technology. Currently these owners aren’t big on mobile shopping, but they did cough up 11.4 billion RMB in 2011. That’s peanuts compared to the 305 billion RMB that the market’s projected to be worth in 2015.

Taobao, China’s largest shopping site, hoovered up a cool 12 billion RMB of that cash in 2011, and they’re shooting for the moon in order to secure an even larger slice of the pie in the future. This year the company is estimating that it will cash in to the tune of 50 billion RMB, that’s a phenomenal 400+% growth in a year.

There has also been a significant shift over the last year in terms of purchasing decisions on the mobile web – clients are moving from buying virtual products (games, ringtones, etc.) to buying physical goods. Taobao are confident that they’re ready to serve these clients as they go from 100 million unique mobile web visitors to 200 million this year.

The clever folks at Taobao have finally woken up to the possibilities of combining their shopping service with a dedicated browser. The idea is that the new browser platform delivers a certain amount of additional security when you spend, as well as boosting the shopping experience for the hard core purchaser.

The browser has only been around for a couple of months and the latest version is 1.0.14. In addition to Baidu and Google, it lets you search using eTao directly in the browser and unsurprisingly the default home page is also Taobao related. At the moment it’s not clear as to whether this is a replacement of the old partnership project between Taobao and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or a parallel project designed to appeal to a different user base.

You’ll find that the browser works on all platforms including smartphones, and that’s good news because one of the coolest features of this browser – is in built gesture control. So if you flick your finger in an L-shape (or your mouse on a PC) – you’ll close the current tab.

There’s a strong emphasis on security certificate validation to prevent users from being scammed by dummy/fake sites. Which is pretty handy when you consider the somewhat unscrupulous nature of some of the internet’s *ahem* businesspeople.

The bad news? Currently the support for the browser doesn’t include English but if you’re confident in your Putonghua – you can download the browser from here. Then you can shop until your heart’s content.

The Iron Legend workshop in the Southern city of Huizhou is quietly assembling an army of killer robots, to be deployed nationally to protect strategically significant locations. We take a photo tour.

This is the boss. He is ex-PLA. A metal-working wizard, building unstoppable killbots.

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This is what he is working on. Fierce.

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Much like how Tony Stark created the first version of his Iron Man suit out of scrap parts, the Iron Legend workshop uses scrap parts to build its supersoldiers. Once they become sentient, the robots tend to freak out when they see this room.

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This guy is a supersoldier robot counselor. In charge of molding their fragile psyches into stable, responsible killers.

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This robot is one of his breakthroughs. In 2007 he crushed a whole village on a bloodthirsty rampage, but today is rehabilitated and protects the workshop itself.

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A new breed of robot supersoldier cat, ready for deployment.

Protecting a strategically significant trade show.

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Protecting strategically significant cute girls.

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This robot was deployed to protect the strategically significant Kunming KFC.

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Look at this thing! It must be built for a special purpose.

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Yes of course. Protecting a strategically significant IMAX.

(You can buy this tank for 320,000rmb)

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Micro machines

You can also pick up a mini supersoldier model for your desktop. Just be sure to stay on it’s good side. Oil it every day. Feed it plenty of paperclips.

Giant metal beasts ~ 20,000-150,000rmb

Desktop models ~ 55-2,000rmb