eBay Eachnet’s main Chinese competitor Taobao.com has maintained a leading market position since it was founded because of its menu of free goodies for users. Taobao is run by e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba.com.

Chang Lin, vice president of eBay Eachnet, says users will enjoy life-long free service when they open a new store on eBay Eachnet. Users who have already had a store on eBay Eachnet can enjoy a free upgrade of their stores, and users who purchased a high-end store or superior store with eBay Eachnet between January and April this year will be offered excellent classified resources before the end of June. In addition, users who bought a high-end or superior store from eBay Eachnet in May will gain a full refund.

Chang says China’s online transactions are still in an infant stage, so the launch of the zero-cost platform will attract lots of new netizens to try the company’s service.

As one of the earliest e-commerce companies in China, eBay Eachnet, a joint venture between eBay and Tom Online, has experienced a period of depression in the recent two years.

Source : Chinatechnews

According to ccidnet.com, Alimama’s new product will rely on up to 400,000 websites and 180,000 blog sites currently served by the company. Though the company has refused to make any comment on the new product, it is believed that the product has been basically shaped and received good feedback from users in a small scale testing.

Alimama is said to have been investing a huge amount of material and human resource on the product since the beginning of this year, including sending technicians from Beijing to support the product’s development in Hangzhou and holding communication exchanges with Yahoo! in the U.S. on the product.

Alimama’s new product model will pose a major challenge to such Chinese advertising alliances as Baidu.com’s.

Source : Chinatechnews

‘We achieved solid growth in revenue and profitability in the first quarter,’ said David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com. ‘During the quarter, we restructured our Gold Supplier sales force into two teams focusing on customer acquisition and customer retention, respectively. We believe that in the long run the new structure will lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and sales productivity. Looking ahead, the restructuring of our sales force will continue to go through an adjustment period in the second quarter.’

Alibaba.com says it had 327,118 paying members as of March 31, 2008, representing a 35.6% increase from the first quarter of 2007 and a 7.1% increase from the fourth quarter of 2007. Its international marketplace had 28,548 Gold Supplier members, a net increase of 8,484 from 20,064 as of March 31, 2007 and a net increase of 1,164 from 27,384 at the end of 2007.

Revenue from its international marketplace was RMB464.2 million in the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 42.9% year-on-year and 4.3% quarter-on-quarter, accounting for 68.3% of total revenue.

‘The credit crisis and slowing US economy is creating pressures on the global trade environment. Nevertheless, buyer activity on our international marketplace continued to increase during the period,’ said Wei. ‘We are actively monitoring the situation and will take proactive steps to minimize the potential impact from any downturn of the US economy by continuing to develop our fast growing China marketplace, focusing on industries and regions less likely to be affected and increasing our geographic expansion. We believe that with our management focus on rolling out these new initiatives, we are well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will continue to deliver good results.’

Gross profit for the first quarter of 2008 was RMB601.2 million, an increase of 55.5% year-on-year and 8.6% quarter-on-quarter. Our gross margin improved to 88.4% in the period, compared to 87.1% in the same period last year and 87.3% in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Total operating expenses were RMB310.5 million in the first quarter, representing a 44.8% increase year-on-year and a 16.1% decrease quarter-on-quarter. Profit from operations for the first quarter of 2008 was RMB311.9 million, an increase of 81.0% from the first quarter of 2007 and 67.1% from the fourth quarter of 2007.

Source : Chinatechnews

Prakash Iyer, managing director of Infomedia, said in a press statement, ‘As India’s largest Yellow Pages company ¨C and now as part of the Network 18 group ¨C Infomedia is delighted to bring Alibaba.com’s strength and global reach to Indian businesses. We have a long history of helping SMEs grow their business and this partnership will help Indian companies realize their fullest potential worldwide. The Infomedia-Alibaba.com partnership will bring value to Indian SMEs by giving them a larger, multi-media business platform encompassing domestic and global trade services.’

India has more than 8 million SMEs, which account for almost 40% of India’s industrial output and employ around 30 million people. It is estimated that 3 million SMEs are engaged in B2B trade and around 1 million are in the export business. Alibaba.com has more than 400,000 members in India, already making it one of the country’s largest B2B online marketplaces by member count. Alibaba.com launched a special India Channel in October 2007 to help Indian suppliers find local and global buyers for their products and services. The India Channel has been well received by members, with more than 20,000 Indian companies signing up each month since January 2008.

The Alibaba.com and Infomedia partnership will combine the power of traditional print publishing with online media and e-commerce, providing Indian SMEs with a one-stop solution for global and domestic trade. Together they will create a strong online community of Indian business people and provide them with a single cost-effective channel to promote their products and source from quality suppliers in India and around the world. It will also provide SMEs in India with the latest industry news and technical developments in multi-media formats.

Source : Chinatechnews

The website, which is jointly created by China International E-commerce Center, Guangzhou Zhengjia Network Modern Service Company and Guangzhou Zhengjia Square, is expected to open formally in June this year.

According to Lin Jianguo, chief operation officer of zhengjiaweb.com, the project will be completed in three schedules with a total investment of about RMB1.6 billion. The part that will see an opening in June is the first phase of the project and will consist of about 20 channels centered on retailing. Lin says that different from Alibaba and Taobao.com, zhengjiaweb.com is strictly a B2C website, so all the businesses on the website must also have offline stores. To ensure goods quality, the website will cooperate with four logistics companies of EMS, ZJS Express, YTO Express and Shentong Express and have the businesses undertake the goods delivery fee acquisition.

Zhengjiaweb.com will be first based in Guangzhou and it will later expand across the country with branches set up in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Wuhan. Lin introduces that the Beijing branch will be set up in July, Shanghai branch in October, Chengdu branch in February 2009 and the Shenzhen branch in July 2009.

The company plans to get its businesses fully listed in Nasdaq between June 2009 and December 2012.

Source : Chinatechnews

‘In Mandarin Chinese, ‘Jindian’ literally means ‘enter the store,’ which is exactly our goal,’ said Adam Yan, eFuture’s chairman and chief executive officer. ‘Over 80 percent of local suppliers do business directly with local retailers. With China Jindian, we’re leveraging our strong relationships with China’s retail clients to help local suppliers enter retail stores across the country. This exciting development simplifies the supply chain and will also help our over 700 retail clients, which use over 500,000 suppliers and include many of China’s top 100 retailers, expand their procurement sources, increase procurement efficiency and reduce procurement cost.’

The China Jindian online platform provides a searchable database of subscriber-posted listings focusing on the retail and consumer goods industries. On the website, suppliers can post listings with product descriptions, contact information, location and in some cases videos showcasing the suppliers’ factories. The postings are separated by category, brand and location and searchable by retailers, who can post requests for products and suppliers, store information and details about new store openings.

Yesterday the companies launched a 100-day beta period for the website.

Source : Chinatechnews

Guo Xiuhong, vice president of Zhongyu, says the company will mainly focus on B2C and B2B mobile phone e-commerce and try to seek an advantageous position in the ever increasing e-commerce market. He says that the company will also launch a mobile phone e-magazine.

Guo believes that the extensive chain network is the biggest advantage for Zhongyu to enter the e-commerce market. What’s more, he says Zhongyu owns greater advantage in goods price thanks to its large retailing scale.

Zhongyu promises to offer consumers the same after-sales service for the mobile phones they purchase from the company’s e-commerce channel as from the company’s stores.

Source : Chinatechnews

Under their cooperation, Amazon.cn will support online payment via Alipay’s platform. The parties are said to be signing a contract right now whose details will soon be released.

Not long ago, Taobao.com announced plans to enter the B2C market. Hence it has become a competitor of Amazon.cn and Dangdang.com, while at the same time its sister service Alipay began to cooperate with many vertical B2C websites, including redbaby.com.cn and 360buy.com.

So far, Alipay has not made any comment on the cooperation with Amazon.cn, though Joyo’s PR has confirmed that they are indeed negotiating with Alipay on the cooperation which will be publicized soon.

Source : Chinatechnews

Top management from Expedia has disclosed to local media that the company has just set up an office and a call center in China to promote their corporate travel service in the country.

Jean-Pierre Remy, president of the Expedia Corporate Travel Group, believes there are a lot of opportunities for Expedia in China now that there are few professional corporate travel providers. Remy says they will introduce their international clients to the Chinese market as the first step of their development in the country, and they believe that eLong will also offer them much support with the local resources. However, Remy also realizes that online corporate travel is not so widely received in the Asian countries, including China, as it is in Europe, therefore he says Expedia will launch a series of localization policies after its entry into China. The company already has stiff competition as Chinese websites like 51MICE.com already command hundreds of corporate travel clients and large database of corporate travel bookers in China.

Regarding eLong’s continued loss and the suspension of parts of its businesses, Remy says that Expedia won’t make any comment on eLong’s operation and management, but eLong will remain an important partner for Expedia to expand its corporate travel business in China. Remy emphasizes that Expedia mainly targets big corporate clients, while eLong primarily focuses on leisure and individual travelers.

Source : Chinatechnews

Lu Zhaoxi, president of Taobao.com, has attached great importance to the company’s B2C service. At the end of last year, Taobao.com set up a special B2C department to be responsible for the operation of B2C services. To create a new B2C platform, the company also held a series of business bidding activities earlier this year. However, it has not published any information of the businesses to complete the platform testing.

Taobao.com is arranging an internal testing of the new Taobao Shopping Mall, which is expected to be formally launched in mid-April.

Dell has has also just set up its first flagship store on Taobao.com.

This is the first time that a computer manufacturer has ever set up an online store in a B2C Chinese website like Taobao.com.

Sun Weilun, marketing director of Dell Greater China’s Individual Client Department, says that the opening of the new store at Taobao.com is another example that Dell has made since the launching of its client experience center and its partnership with Chinese electronics retailer Gome.

Source : Chinatechnews