Taobao (淘寶網)

 

taobao.com

Founded by Alibaba Group on May 10, 2003, Taobao operates the largest e-commerce in Asia. It hosts more than 6.2 million online stores, and facilitates business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer retail by providing a platform for businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online retail stores. According to Taobao, about 53,000 items are sold on its website every minute, and its gross merchandise volume was about 400 billion yuan in 2010. In June 2011, Alibaba revealed that Taobao would be split three different companies: eTao (to be used for product searches), Taobao Mall (a B2C platform), and Taobao Marketplace (a C2C platform).