
How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao - williswee
https://www.techinasia.com/were-war-story-jack-ma-ebay-taobao
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not_that_noob
Some of this is of course the Chinese government placing its thumb on the
scales in favor of local businesses. It does this for a lot of reasons, but
it's clear it happens.

However, compare the situation to other more open countries (e.g. India,
Japan, Indonesia ) There are culture, social and language specific nuances
that local entrepreneurs understand far better than outsiders, and that
accounts for a significant portion of these copycat business success.

I think American business generally have a tough time accounting for the
latter into account when they go overseas. IOW, not all of Jack Ma's success
stems from the government being on his side.

~~~
jdietrich
I'm not sure that 'copycat' is entirely fair. Google wasn't the first search
engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, Amazon wasn't the first
online retailer. Flipkart or Taobao have some similarities to certain western
retail platforms, but are profoundly different in many important ways.

WeChat might have had the advantage of the Great Firewall, but they have also
built a genuinely innovative platform that is better suited to the Chinese
market and in many respects much more sophisticated than any Western
equivalent. No western company would have grasped the importance of hongbao or
implemented it so skilfully. No western company could have anticipated the
hugely positive reaction to WeChat Moments advertising and the remarkably high
CPM.

I think there's a certain "not invented here" attitude prevalent in Silicon
Valley. We do iteration, they do copycats. We build a better mousetrap, they
make shitty knock-offs.

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docker_up
Competing against eBay is like saying you're competing in a 100m race against
someone in a wheelchair. eBay has done nothing to make itself better in the
last 15 years. New "features" routinely fail, and their APIs are a graveyard
of dropped ideas. I hope Taobao expands to the US, eBay needs real
competition, anyone working there should be embarrassed for themselves, more
importantly the Directors and above.

~~~
techwizrd
When I was interning at eBay a few years ago, they were doing some amazing
work. I worked with the machine translation team and they were doing cutting
edge research all over the place with new patents being awarded regularly
(even to interns!). Many of their algorithms like spelling correction were
significantly better than the state of the art, in part due to their unique
data set. They were also actively rebuilding and rewriting critical services
to improve reliability and speed, from their computer vision to their speech
recognition to their search engine to their seller tools. They split from
Paypal and rebuilt and redesigned the app and the website. They started
shipping boxes to sellers with the eBay branding to solve the problem of
seller's not having shipping material. They started marketing and selling eBay
giftcards in numerous stores. They started curated collections of themed finds
on eBay (and ML-generated collections). They were reaching out to major brands
to sell on eBay as a storefront. They unveiled a really well done AI chat bot
to sell eBay items to users.

It's an impressively run shop from a technical perspective at least. I do not
think it's fair to eBay or it's current and former employees to say that
they've done nothing to make themselves better in the last 15 years.

~~~
jdietrich
Clever tech experiments don't make up for hostile UX. I begrudgingly use eBay
when I have no other choice, but I don't enjoy the experience one bit. The
listings are flooded with obviously counterfeit products, obviously dangerous
electrical goods and Chinese sellers who are obviously lying about their
location.

The massive fees I pay as a seller offer me no safeguards whatsoever, because
the seller protection policies are riddled with loopholes that every scammer
knows about. I budget for the fact that I'm going to be defrauded about 5% of
the time, in the knowledge that eBay will always side with the fraudster.

You can do all the machine learning curation you like, but it's just frosting
on a dog turd. The core experience of buying and selling is utterly miserable.
That's the stuff that needs to be fixed.

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chaostheory
When the Chinese market is effectively closed to foreign companies once they
make any inroads, it's easy to win against ebay or another US company.

~~~
moscovium
There's no competition like no competition!

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dqpb
> _Jack told me: “I started looking at the market and realized that, pretty
> soon, eBay was going to try to get aggressive with its business in China.
> They’d start with consumers, but over time they will start coming after
> Alibaba’s wholesalers. Competition was inevitable. So I decided the only way
> we can slow them down is to launch a site to compete directly with their
> Chinese language site. "_

That, plus the fact that China will just pull the plug on any American
business gaining too much traction.

~~~
nehene
> That, plus the fact that China will just pull the plug on any American
> business gaining too much traction.

So did they? We all know why Google and Facebook isn't in China, but as far as
I can tell I don't find similar conflicts regarding companies like Amazon and
eBay. The consensus online seems to be that they have been failing in the
Chinese market by their own hand. Which does sound pretty plausible
considering they aren't even that good in Europe.

~~~
qiqing
Starbucks is doing very well in China (as well as KFC, Pizza Hut, and
McDonalds, and their compatriots), and also Apple, Nike, Tesla, Coach,
Carrefour, Tesco, and more. (Latter 2 are from Europe.)

Prior to the rise of Taobao, most of my family members didn't really use eBay
in China. Most of them prefer using mobile (like the bulk of consumers in
China), but if you prioritize the browser experience and 'consistency across
the global platform' over what your local users want, well, shrug, let's
pretend there's nothing to learn here from a UX perspective...

In contrast, Starbucks has a different user experience when you walk into one
in Shanghai or Hangzhou. You place your order and pay for it via phone and
pick it up at the register and you don't have to stand in a line. I _wish_
they'd replicate that in the US.

~~~
nehene
I still haven't seen a suggestion engine (including the image search verity)
nor chat system (in terms of utility) that could compete with what Taobao had
a couple of years ago. (It does probably exist in China though). I think
people confuse Taobao with AliExpress. The latter being about as useless as
eBay. Once you build some history on Taobao, you can spend days just browsing.

------
microdrum
* _Goes to war with eBay_ *

* _Yes, hello DNS this is Jack Ma, please nullroute ebay.cn kthx_ *

* _Wins war_ _

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forkLding
[https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/...](https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/09/12/how-
ebay-failed-in-china/amp/)

See above for a more full analysis, Chinese govt. could have given
preferential treatment but it was Ebay that had adverts all over Chinese buses
and had blocked Taobao from advertising on Chinese web platforms through
exclusive partnerships.

~~~
mahranch
> Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment

How do we know they didn't? They could have just decided "Now that Taobao is
up and running, we can get rid of ebay". They've done worse before, so it's
not a stretch.

It's interesting that there are no massive web properties in China with the
bulk market share (google, facebook, ebay, amazon, twitter, etc) that _aren
't_ Chinese owned. Yet, in the entire rest of the world, those same websites
are #1. That's not just some coincidence or one-off, that's clearly
governmental manipulation and control.

If it was just one or two web properties, I could understand. Like how it is
with Yahoo! Japan. But _all_ of them? Sorry, China doesn't want western
companies running the show within their country. Articles like this are moot
since there was no future with eBay in the #1 spot thanks to the CCP.

~~~
forkLding
Those tech companies are the result of censorship and definitely Chinese
preferential treatment and national security, etc. Chinese preferential
treatment by a Chinese govt is normal like the US prefers US companies such as
US bailing out Ford and GM because of jobs. China would much prefer chinese
companies and workers instead of international because it provides jobs and
income.

US companies also dominate in China, see McDonalds or Starbucks or Apple in
China. A lot of international companies dominate China, just not all of
technology, also Apple is a tech company last time I checked. Even if it was a
democratic Chinese govt, whats stopping it from supporting a Chinese company
over a US one, whos to say that the democratic govt wont go China for the
Chinese like Trump?

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seanhunter
To all the people saying Jack Ma is only winning because of govt intervention:
Have any of you guys actually been on ebay in the last 10 years? The
surprising thing is not that they got beaten in China, it's that they're still
in business anywhere else.

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taobility
From all these comments, you can tell how naive those commentors are. If you
all blame the failure of eBay due to Chinese government, why it would choose
Alibaba, not other Chinese companies? Why Alibaba would success and be one of
Top 2 in China? In 2000s, Alibaba is nobody, and eBay is the giant with
unlimited fund and great brand. But it still failed due to its vanity.

~~~
taobility
It's easy to blame Chinese government as it's political correct. But don't
forget, Chinese market is also a fully competitive market.

~~~
pietroglyph
I agree that it's easy to blame the Chinese government in this case, and that
there's more to it than that, but just because competition _exists_ in the
Chinese economy doesn't mean the government isn't adjusting the scales behind
the scenes.

~~~
wanghq
Alibaba not only competes with non-Chinese companies but also domestic
companies/banks which have a closer relationship to government than Alibaba.
For example, imagine how hard to start Alipay business when banks don't
support you.

~~~
pietroglyph
That wasn't really my point… I agree there's competition, but my point was
that business are behilden to the government's wishes behind the scenes.

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scarejunba
Haha, all this is irrelevant when you can always count on your government
arbitrarily banning foreign companies.

Not really complaining. It's just business. And we need them more than they
need us so they're turning the screws.

~~~
influx
Is it really just business? Why doesn't the USA do the same to all foreign
companies as well?

~~~
scarejunba
We do. That's how we stop Broadcom from purchasing Qualcomm, get them to move
here, and then still block them.

Just business.

The Chinese do it even better because the government is more powerful there
than the US Government is here.

~~~
WillPostForFood
There is a big difference between blocking Broadcom from buying Qualcomm, and
blocking Broadcom from doing business in the US. Which is what the equivalent
would be.

~~~
scarejunba
It's just protectionism of different sorts. The difference is like that
between a member of a Marxist Communist Party and a Marxist-Leninist Communist
Party. They think it's super different, but ultimately they're both
communists.

~~~
ucaetano
> It's just protectionism of different sorts.

Sure, but both being protectionism doesn't make them equal or even comparable.

Placing a 5% fee on certain products and banning all imports are both
protectionism, but are in no way comparable.

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forinti
eBay is such a horrible user experience that I wonder how it still stands.

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Leary
Seems like Ebay's status as a public company hurt it.

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hawflakes
I wonder if this gets into all the internal politics on the eBay-PayPal side
of things...

~~~
ukyrgf
[https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/paypal-ebay-
paym...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/paypal-ebay-payments-
split-adyen/index.html)

They've already split off.

~~~
hawflakes
I was referencing the politics between the two companies at the time they were
fighting Alibaba/Taobao/Alipay. I have some firsthand experience on the
eBay/PayPal side of things.

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mikert5671
This is propaganda

