Baidu Enters Customer to Customer Market
China’s Internet Heavyweights
If you don’t know already, China has three heavyweight Internet companies, as follows:
- Baidu - The search engine with the largest market share in mainland China
- Alibaba - The place to go to start your search for Chinese suppliers
- Taobao - The eBay of China
It looks like Baidu wants to displace Taobao. Think they stand a decent chance? Leave your thoughts below, or read through this short article, translated from this week’s Modern Weekly:
Baidu’s New (Customer to Customer) Strategy
Baidu is looking for ways to monetize the classified, ‘I Know’, and spaces sections of its site through C2C transactions. Baidu established a division specifically to concentrate on C2C transactions and service, with development in trade / auction technology already being carried out on a large scale. In terms of payment solutions, Baidu is considering whether to develop their own or outright buy another payment solution provider.
Presently Taobao stands out as the market leader in the mainland China C2C market, with over 80% of the market. This is far ahead of its competitors Yiqu and Paipai Net. Although mainland China does not yet have a profitable C2C platform, everyone in the industry is optimistic about the potential for the C2C market.
And Baidu has a huge advantage in this. As the lead search engine in mainland China, Baidu has an advantage its competitors lack with more than 100 million users of its services. C2C transactions are the best and most important way for Baidu to monetize this user base.
But having a large number of users does not guarantee Baidu’s success. It’s important to remember that Taobao already has a stable user base that is accustomed to its services and the Zhifubao payments system. Taobao users trust and belief in its systems are already quite strong. So if Baidu is just an imitation of Taobao and eBay, its chances of success might be a little lower than most think.
