Today I took delivery of my first Taobao online purchase! An umbrella stroller made in China - but to export quality (it's a French brand). Taobao is the Chinese equivalent of eBay - the online shopping website and there are hundreds of millions of products and hundreds of millions of subscribers/users - bigger than eBay I understand. eBay was a spectacular failure in China - the story is well documented Products are usually cheaper than you find in regular stores, and postage / courier costs are nominal in China (the stroller cost about $3 to be couriered from another province to our front door). To prove that word of mouth is the best form of advertising, I can attest to the fact that Taobao comes up in everyday conversation all the time. Something akin to: Dang I've been to 5 different stores but can't find x product! Response: have you tried Taobao? The difficulty is that the website is completely in Chinese - but with the help of Google Chrome's auto translate function and websites such as taobaofieldguide.com it becomes achievable for my non-Chinese speaking self!
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