Sign Up for a Taobao Account

adventures in online shopping – for people living in china

Registration Takes Less than a Minute

If you have ever signed up for anything online, the Taobao registration process will be very familiar. All you need is a username, a password and an e-mail address. Start by going to the Taobao registration page.

Enter your information as indicated by my green hints:

This screenshot should be enough to sort you out, but if you need more hints, here is a detailed walkthrough of the Taobao sign up screen.

A couple quick tips:

Choose a good password, with a number and a symbol. Otherwise Taobao will nag you about having a crappy password every time you log in. Also, when choosing which email address to use, keep in mind that Taobao will send you some emails whenever you buy something. When you are done, hit the grey button.

The next screen tells you to check your email for a confirmation message.

new b2 taobao e mail confirmation on its way Sign Up for a Taobao Account taobao international

Time to Check Your Email

If you don’t see it right away, check the junk message folder. That’s where I found mine! Open the newly received e-mail and click the big fat grey “Confirm” button in the middle of the message.

Success!

You will be taken to a page confirming your successful registration. Congratulations! You are now the newest member of Taobao!

e1 registration success1 Sign Up for a Taobao Account taobao international

Mac Users: More info for you here~

Mac users interface might be a bit different from the guides about, since we don’t have a Mac, we’re unable to put up some screenshots. However, one of our kind reader – Master Arvey – generously shared some of his findings regarding to Taobao registration on Mac, as follows:

Mac users will encounter the following hiccup. When clicking on the
registration link, you will notice an orange field. This field tells
you to download a browser plugin and install it. The link below the
orange field will download that browser plugin. Once you open up the
disk image and double-click the installer, it should guide you through
the installation process. It installs a browser plugin called
“aliedit.webplugin” into the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ directory.
The other catch is that this browser plugin only works for Webkit-
based browsers. In non-geek speak, this means that Firefox won’t work;
only Safari and Webkit-based browsers like Omniweb will work with
Taobao.

(As a sidenote, it seems that this plugin is used for encrypting
transactions. I analyzed the plugin and found that it made some
decryption/encryption calls, but I don’t really know exactly what it’s
doing. Someone with more computer hacking skillz could do better
analysis using tcpdump or similar tools. Furthermore, there is also no
guarantee that this plugin itself is secure. All I know is that Taobao
requires it for Mac users.)

After installing the plugin, restart your Webkit-based browser and the
rest of the instructions should apply.

Thank you so much Master Arvey!!! =)

Next Step

But before you can start buying things, you will need to add money to your account. That means a trip to your local China Post Office to buy a Taobao Recharge Card.

26 Comments »

Karen said:

I subscribed to Taobao some time ago, before your very useful site was available, my painstakingly translating the pages etc. I think though that I failed to keep the alipay box ticked. Now when I use the link on your site to open the page to recharge the account, it asks me to sign into alipay, ie doesn’t take me to the link. any suggestions on what I can do from here – how to set up linked alipay account?

thanks – great site by the way and look forward to buying something soon

Karen

# 17 February 2009 at 8:23 am

The Field Guide (author) said:

Hi Karen,

Ask and ye shall receive! Check out our new guide to Registering for an Alipay Account

And let me know if that solves your problem.
~TFG

# 17 February 2009 at 1:07 pm

Kylie Horsfall said:

I think your website is fabulous – well done! I have been wanting to buy from TaoBao for ages, and now I feel like I can get an account and get started. Thanks so much!
Kylie

# 20 February 2009 at 8:09 pm

The Field Guide (author) said:

Rock on Kylie! Let us know how it goes.

# 20 February 2009 at 11:32 pm

David said:

I signed up for my account today. Thanks!

# 6 March 2009 at 4:53 pm

The Field Guide (author) said:

Rock on, David! Let us know how you do on your Taobao journey.

# 7 March 2009 at 9:14 pm

A.Galipeau said:

You know I have been diying to get an account,not to buy cheap stuff I can get here.I want writing brushes which good ones are hard to find and are very expensive. especially when I find out what they pay for them in china.The collections are very limited and most of the srtuff on the english web is absolute crap like those sets in the fan shaped case.They are everywhere yet on taobao no where to be found.Its Irinic when most electronics and stuff like that is similar to western prices. The greed makes me sick. When I see a brush on Taobao for 7 Yuan(about one dollar) and its like 50 dollars here.

# 9 March 2009 at 2:55 pm

The Field Guide (author) said:

Writing brushes!? That’s an interesting inquiry. Where are you writing from, A. Galipeau?

# 9 March 2009 at 4:06 pm

Lisa said:

Where can i find information on how to set up an on-line store at Taobao? I live in both Italy and the US. Your site is fantastic (fantastico!!)

# 10 April 2009 at 1:38 am

Oseas said:

Hi i am new TAO BAO don’t speak chinese someone help me..

# 30 June 2009 at 7:25 am

Oseas said:

Hi me again. I am from USA can you buy stuff even if your not from CHINA.

Thank you. for the responds

# 30 June 2009 at 7:27 am

The Field Guide (author) said:

Hi Oseas, there is good news for you. Buying from Taobao is even easier for people outside the US, since you don’t need to worry about signing up for an account. There are dudes that will help you take care of all that for a very small fee.

Check out this link: Buying on Taobao from Overseas

# 30 June 2009 at 9:18 am

aloha99 said:

I just signed up today. Though I don’t read much Chinese it was pretty easy thanks to your site. FYI the layout for the signing up page – and the one that follow – is now different. Though they have pretty much the same information on it it might confuse a bit people who read zero Chinese.

# 11 August 2009 at 2:29 pm

The Field Guide (author) said:

Hey thanks for the heads up, aloha! We will get our goblins on the case right away.

If you see any more cobwebs in our tutorials, let us know!

# 11 August 2009 at 3:38 pm

Ant said:

Yes, I’m struggling with the new signup page.

Worked out:

The top seems to be email

Next username?

There seems to be a button to download an exe file??

Then don’t know besides the catchpa

# 25 August 2009 at 11:17 am

Karo said:

Hello,

I just registered last week and everything was going well. But when I wanted to connect in my account 1st time, my password was rejected. After tried several times, I followed procedure to change password and still doesn’t work. Could you help me ?

Thanks!

# 31 August 2009 at 3:15 pm

laobanniang said:

Hi Karo, that sounds like one of those tricky browser incompatibility problems, I guess you were not using IE or windows system? IE is the only browser that Taobao supports well, maybe you can try to change your password again in IE, see if it works fine. please let us know if you still got problems. =)

# 1 September 2009 at 10:43 am

Jonas said:

Hello!

I was just wondering if there would be any way to revert this procedure and delete an account? I have stopped using taobao since I will be moving very soon. I have no money on the account and I therefore I would like to delete it.

By the way, this is a brilliant website!! It helped me a lot when I started an account and I am usre that it is helping everyone else.

# 22 September 2009 at 10:16 pm

laobanniang said:

Hi Jonas, I looked through the internet, looks like Taobao doesn’t provide much option for cancelling the account. Only accounts that never had any transaction behaviors (such as make an auction, transfer money, sell a product etc) can be cancelled, you can do it by leaving a message to Taobao staff through here. Choose the first option from the first drop-down list. However, if you did one of these, your account can’t be cancelled, I don’t understand why.

# 23 September 2009 at 9:41 am

Jonas said:

Hello!

Thank you for replying. I think that this is funny but i guess I will survive. I will just leave the account the way it is and move on. Thanks a lot for your help and thank you to everyone who made this web site possible!

# 23 September 2009 at 9:03 pm

laobanniang said:

You’re welcome Jonas, we wish you had a great time in China and welcome you to come back any time!! =D

# 24 September 2009 at 9:54 am

Master Arvey said:

The registration site looks a little different on the Mac. I’d be happy to email TFG some screenshots. Basically, for Taobao, you can only use Webkit-based browsers (i.e. Safari or anything else). You need to download and install a plugin. I don’t know how dangerous this plugin is. I installed it and my registration screen looked similar to what was shown in this field guide. I assume you have my email. Thanks for the site!

# 25 September 2009 at 5:31 pm

Helen said:

I’ve been trying to register for an account for the past two days, hoping that the next day it wil work but I’m running across the same issue. It jkeeps bringing me back to the sign up page after I have input all necessary info, it leaves a red x next to the security code. I think it means that I didn’t type it in correctly, I make sure it’s right every single time, but it won’t let me pass!! what to do? HELP!

# 8 December 2009 at 6:27 pm

laobanniang said:

Hi Helen, try to do this in IE explore on a windows based computer, with the security plug-in installed. This is a very typical problem of the crappy security plug-in Alipay has….

# 9 December 2009 at 8:46 am

Carrie said:

I’ve registered on Tao Bao but haven’t received the e-mail back giving me the the confirmation and I have checked my junk-mail box- Any suggestions?

# 11 December 2009 at 1:53 pm

laobanniang said:

Hi Carrie, It’s possible that your email server blocked the confirmation email or it’s simply lost on the way of transaction when your server is busy. If you haven’t cleaned up your cookie in your PC yet, you can re-do the registration again still using the same email. This will let Taobao send you an confirmation email again. If it’s your server that’s blocking registration mail from Taobao, you’ll have to try register again using another email address…

# 15 December 2009 at 2:59 pm

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