Taobao Transaction Platform Analysis : Comparison with eBayEach in China

Taobao is an affiliated firm of Alibaba which is the biggest B2B platform in the world. Since established in 2003 Taobao has fast got a dominant position in Chinese C2C market. Taobao defeated a former dominant player, eBayEach in late 2006. Actually it was a big news at that time because eBay had continuously made its success story in many places all over the world. This study took a literature research as well as a field survey in order to clarify the competitive advantage factors of Taobao business model. Through the literature review this study presented overall development condition of China’s online industry as well as E-commerce development condition. In addition this study drew out the advantages of Taobao platform by comparing it with eBayEach platform. Through the field survey this study took Chinese users’ satisfaction analysis for Taobao, and picked up key factors which improving their satisfaction for it. Finally this study took a deep interview for heavy users who had purchasing experiences at both Taobao and eBayEach. It can be argued that Taobao C2C platform makes a big contribution to improve the operational efficiency of online trade, in result Taobao became a local leader to create Chinese unique online business model even though it is not verified yet outside China.