
Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD - westiseast
http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/taobao-sales-19-billion-bonanza/
======
forrestthewoods
Incredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of
China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done.
That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the
countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced
manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the
amount of work necessary to make things function at "China scale".

~~~
jessedhillon
Two words of praise followed by a stream of acknowledged personal biases and
admitted stereotypes, which are forwarded anyway. For what reason? To prove
the author's own point that he/she doesn't understand the scale of a company
which serves one billion people?

My humble suggestion is this: next time, if you don't have a good reason to
recite publicly a litany of unfounded assumptions about an entire country and
people, don't -- write something like this instead:

> _Incredibly impressive. I know nothing about China._

~~~
forrestthewoods
Why? Because those are common misconceptions that I am far from alone in
holding. Bringing them up in the face of a monumental achievement is helpful
for both myself and others who have had similar thoughts.

~~~
Gigablah
In other words, you're trying to justify your own racism?

(If you have to preface your statements with "This may sound horrible and
racist", they probably are.)

~~~
chrischen
His statement was never racist, which is probably why he qualified racist with
"may sound." China isn't a race.

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Kayven
OK, I will give a little introduce to you foreign guys: Taobao is a B2C/C2C
E-commerce site. 11/11 is called Single's Day(all number is '1', you see?), as
some song sings, "single boy single boy.single all the way!".

Taobao is one of the three biggest IT company in China. It is composed of
taobao(C2C), tianmao(B2C), alibaba(B2B), yahoo China and etao(shopping
search).

Moreover, you must know that on October 30, 2012, China's largest online book
retailer, oldest B2C electronic business, the first landing Nasdaq China's
e-commerce company, Dangdang, declared to join Tianmao.

Finally, I should say as Ma-yun said : I am very cruel, more brutal tomorrow,
the day after tomorrow is very beautiful, but most of the dead tomorrow night,
only those who are the real heroes to see the sun on the day after tomorrow.

~~~
Kayven
Sing with me together!

single boy, single boy, single all the way!

single man, single man, single all the way!

------
reedlaw
For anyone who hasn't lived in China it's hard to imagine how much better
Taobao is than EBay. No fees for buyers or sellers, no transaction fees for up
to 1000 RMB purchase, same day delivery in many cities, prices that are way
better than retail, and the ability to find just about anything.

~~~
BEIJINGSHOTS
word up. and no freezing your account for signing in from the different ip
address, or whatever reason ebay decides is worthy of taking your money

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ghshephard
Particularly fascinating, that as a long time daily (hourly?) reader of HN
I've never even heard of Taobao before today.

~~~
ComputerGuru
China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like
Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own.

The average citizen in China does not use any foreign websites to do anything
[citation needed]. All the services you and I consume online are replicated in
China by Chinese companies. From Gmail to Yahoo!, from Facebook to twitter,
from Amazon to eBay, from CNN to FOX.

It's really no surprise you haven't heard of this (I haven't either). Very few
such Chinese sites even attempt at marketing themselves out of mainland China
(notable exemption being the original Alibaba marketplace to great effect,
Taobao is apparently a different site by the same group). It's fascinating how
the internet has so effectively bridged other cultures while keeping others at
arm's length - even when connected and technically accessible.

~~~
bmelton
So, for every new Chinese startup, are there hordes of people crying about why
they haven't rolled out to America?

(I'm sorry, this comment isn't like me, but I couldn't resist.)

~~~
toyg
You can't really complain that Chinese companies exploit a market left
untouched by culturally-ignorant Western companies. I bet if more US companies
spent more time targeting the Chinese market in the right way (i.e. perfect
i18n support, interfaces built with Chinese languages in mind etc), these
knockoffs would get less traction.

(Of course there's always the political problem, the knockoffs are often
State-sponsored etc etc, but I bet they'd suffer in face of superior
competition, if they actually _had_ real competition.)

~~~
hnriot
Look what happens when western companies try? Google, for example...

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yzhou
I've been using taobao intensively for our business for quite a long time. we
are a hardware start-up, we bought components from taobao, make, assemble PCB
prototypes from taobao, It's so much better than ebay, for example, they have
a IM client for you to chat with the seller, negotiate price and shipping cost
in real time, and once the deal is made, they can change the price instantly
for you. There also sites that buy taobao things for you and ship them to the
US, so all you need is a paypal account or a credit card, and the ability to
read Chinese.

~~~
BEIJINGSHOTS
taobao also allows you to list contact information like qq, and cell phone
numbers, whereas on ebay's totalitarian platform, you cant do this

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hoi
Article forgets to mention that it was singles day in China, and Taobao did a
special promotion for it. Still a good record to hol.

~~~
kaka2
right, 應該讓老外知道中國電商在「光棍節」搞促銷的手段是多麼厲害。

~~~
evansdiy
哈哈哈

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alanctgardner2
Reading on a low-res tablet, I couldn't see the right half of the screen.
Thought you might want to know.

~~~
westiseast
thanks!

~~~
nitrogen
While you're at it, I see the same thing in Firefox on Linux. There is no
horizontal scroll bar, either, so I can't scroll to the cropped text. My
window size is currently 1066x891.

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tonyxue
For me it's not surprised for me that you guys don't know Taobao. I would like
to say you can buy everything on Taobao, it's true. For many people in China,
once they come up with something want to buy, they search on Taobao first. And
according to my own experience, you can get what you want in 99% of the time.
You can even explor many creative goods on Taobao. Actually Taobao has done
this sort of big sales many times but not big as this time. Also, there's some
small villages in China that most people in the village are selling their
goods on Taobao and the village has more than 5 carriers carry all the stuff
every day for these sellers.

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brianbreslin
Does anyone know what they did in 2011 from a sales perspective? They are a
marketplace for small retailers, so I'm curious what their margins are or
commissions they take. What % of the total online commerce for that day was
this? Also are these all credit card transactions or are they COD? Other forms
of payments? Is taobao handling all the payment transactions? sorry for all
the questions, I don't read chinese so I can't find all this info on my own.

~~~
wilfra
They own their own version of PayPal which lots of people use, which easily
links up with all of the major Chinese banks + debit cards. They also do a lot
of pre-paid business where people go into the post office and put money on
their account. Sounds weird but it's huge over there.

Don't know about commissions but given how fiercely competitive the market is
(and most of the competition is on price) there is no chance the fees are
anything like ebays (taobao is chinese ebay/amazon).

Side note but interesting: most of the sellers there offer live chat customer
service. You see something you want and you can immediately IM the person
through taobao and ask questions, make modifications to the order and bargain
on the price. It's awesome and so common that it's basically expected.

~~~
kevin_p
Taobao doesn't charge any commission; most of their income comes from
advertising on the home / category / search pages (you might not have noticed
they were ads because they're all for Taobao stores or products sold through
Taobao), and you can also pay to add extra features/customization to your
Taobao store page.

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johnyang
As a witness, I am so proud. HBase also plays a pivotal role in this Crazy
sales. One important application of taobao read 10Gbps and write 5Gbps data
per second from HBase. Another incredible thing is that 1000 million trades
has been processed in Alipay in one day, and even unbelievable thing is , they
don't use Any IBM mini computers, instead, they only use 10 PCs with fusion IO
devices in the trade database.

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stupandaus
Beyond being impressed by Taobao's scale, I would caution HN readers not to
fall into the trap of thinking about China as a monolithic unit. Assuming that
China is homogenous is just as foolish as assuming America is homogenous.
Taobao's success is also tied to their ability to understand the drastic
cultural differences between different areas of the country, and understanding
how to market to these "countries within a country." If you are unfamiliar
with China, I would highly suggest reading about Patrick Chovanec's "Nine
Nations of China."

1\. [http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-
of...](http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of-china/)
2\. [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-
nine...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-nine-nations-
of-china/307769/)

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robingong
mostly, we use java on customed JVM, mysql, customed Nginx(tengine), and etc.

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robryan
As a marketplace how does the discounting work? Do they entice their merchants
to put up discounts on this day? Are they mainly doing centeralised
fulfillment like a fulfilled by amazon or is it up to the merchants to
dispatch?

~~~
est
taobao.com is like ebay, tmall.com is another branch, with certificated
salers. There's no fulfillment like Amazon, everything is up to the buyer to
choose.

The discounting began a month before Nov 11 where the price of the item is set
as the ceiling, from the then price can only be made lower.

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ozchrisb
Is their any information that confirms this. $3.1 billion is almost .5% of
China's GDP. This sounds wrong.

~~~
eikaterine
You're off by a factor of 10.

That being said, it still seems dubious--given China's online population of
538 million people, that's $5.7 average per person spent, which is a little
higher than the average per person expenditure for last year's entire Cyber
Monday ($1.2 billion according to the article, and around 210 million people
online in the US as of February 2011 according to an online source makes about
$5.6). In a country whose average urban per capita disposable income is around
10x lower than the average per capita disposable income in the US overall, I'm
taking this with a grain of salt.

~~~
westiseast
fair point - the figures released by taobao are those in the article, so if
you distrust those, then so be it.

Anecdotally, I believe it. Everyone I know was buying stuff that day, and not
in small amounts - I bought 2 years worth of toothpaste, some baby products,
shower gel... average per-order value needs only to be 180RMB, 86RMB per
reported user, which isn't a lot of money at all here, despite income
disparity.

------
corejava
Yes! We do!

Some app in Java, and more and more app will in Lua. We just changed the ad
system and take more than 200% up qps/pc.

Jon

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dangerboysteve
I find this story to be complete BS. I find it hard to believe this much
volume in one day from one site and everything worked like a charm. The
payments gateways worked flawlessly? I think this is just a publicity stunt to
drive traffic.

~~~
NieJohn
u r totally wrong!The payments gateways is fine！The technical skills of
alibaba is beyond your imagination.Taobao has their own database called
OceanBase,in that day,this database load more than 1.5 billion visit and the
alipay(支付宝) finish 100 billion deal!

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fengxx
I think it is just a figure for advertisement or PR, please do not take it
seriously. Does anyone remember the news about "Alibaba Transferred Alipay
Ownership Without Yahoo Approval", by the way, Taobao is owned by Alibaba
group.

~~~
wilfra
What does a dispute between two corporations have to do with their reported
sales figures? Racist much? Just because they are a Chinese company doesn't
mean they should not be trusted.

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anysql
Share some data from alipay DB system, for the core payment database, total 4
billion transaction processed, 28 billion SQLs are executed, and 193 billion
memory data blocks are touched, and 1.3 billion physical disk read only.

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Jason_zlh
haha !!!!I'm chinese ,after reading your comments I feel strang。 and do u know
the meaning of 11.11? hah ,it means single's day! hah!!!!!!! last ,
www.xiaoneiit.com ,it's my website..... :))))

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portman
I don't speak or read Chinese, but my guess is that not all of these sales
were online, that for many (most?) the payment occurred in retail stores.

~~~
westiseast
nope - taobao is a 100% online store. It's a single shop, where individuals or
big brands can setup stores. AFAIK they have no physical outlets at all, and
everything goes through their own custom payment portal called Zhi Fu Bao
(支付报). That's why it's so incredible!

~~~
roy_x
Great introduction. I am an Chinese and I use Taobao really a lot while I was
in China. There is no such things like physical Taobao shops at all.

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guanggun
操，能说明中国的光棍太多了么？ Fuck, may I say that Chinese has so many single man? 还得注册！！！

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Ce58
see what they did： //player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XNDczOTM0OTcy/v.swf

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Jason_zlh
haha !!!!I'm chinese ,after reading your comments I feel strang。 and do u know
the meaning of 11.11? hah ,it means single's day! hah!!!!!!!

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beret595
hi,guys.I am Beijing.It's really interesting to see your comments. There are
always something exist in this earth ,your do not know .haha

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xhnwsw520
Thanks for paying attention on taobao~~~~

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ch_ch
来自天朝淘宝店主的问候！

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nameisexists
微博观光团飘过...

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wangwei_sh
comments so awesome

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androidapple
你们的评论，笑死我啦，哈哈..

~~~
codeoedoc
me 2 lol when i see your post :-)

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taligent
Surprised nobody is talking about the most interesting part.

Taobao runs almost entirely on Nginx-Lua-MySQL. And I mean entirely. There is
no application server just Nginx. And every request is non blocking all the
way from user to database and back. Very, very fast.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390816>

In fact one of the developers from Taobao wrote the Lua integration.

~~~
zhuzhaoyuan
The ngx_lua solution is awesome, but Taobao runs mostly on Java, not Lua. The
software stack is Nginx(Tengine)-Java-MySQL.

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wilfra
"1hr after the promotion opened, the first package was received."

I think that is the most interesting part. It's pretty incredibile how
efficient taobao is in such an inefficient country.

~~~
yfaming
That's amazing but doubtful. Anyone received his/her package at 01:00 a.m.?
BTW, Taobao is a third-party e-commerce platform, it doesn't handle the
delivery.

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Jason_zlh
why can not display my comment

