Strength

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A Deep understanding of Chinese culture
- Generate tons of job for the local -> growing together [similar to bayan tree CSR] - Aliwangwang -> Chinese likes to talk and bargain during shopping
- Free listing -> Chinese are price sensitive
- Reliable payment system -> Chinese market lacks of regulation to protect both buyer's and seller’s benefit. Such payment system fill up the gap and gives buyer and seller the confidence doing business online.

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B Ecosystem
Taobao developed many products like Tmall, alipay, alisoft, that created a ecosystem. Customers can easily do the B2C, C2C transactions and payments in one system. It gives them the convenience. Such ecosystem also creates a barrier for competitors to enter.

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C Long-Term Marketing Campaign
Taobao puts their advertisement everywhere and more importantly, they make customer centric advertisement ALWAYS there. Many companies may only put advertisement when it is promotion period or there are new product come out. But Taobao invests in advertisement all the time that increased their visibility and branding.

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D Creative company culture that raised up good ideas from employees
Taobao has a very innovative culture , the company always invest in their employee’s proposal and deliver the new idea to the market. Those new ideas are originated from employees, or buyer in Taobao, and those ideas often used to solve buyer/seller’s issues.

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Weakness

A Taobao is limiting only to the Chinese local market, going global is a big challenge.
- The design of the website and the others services are only design to this target market. They have lack of presence in global market. The strategy of providing free listing services between C2C that Taobao is using is more difficult to monitor and there is risk of dummy account sellers, which is uses ommit fraud. The lack of control on the sale of products has had a negative influence in client’s confidence in Taobao. They solve this problem by locking the money via Alipay where they will have to receive acknowledgement that product has been received by buyer before releasing the amount to the seller.

- Strong rivalry between Taobao and Ebay continues.Ebay has whole lot more of experience and presence in the whole world especially in the western counries, There are in total 36 contries using ebay, while Taobao is only prevalent in the chinese speaking market, such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

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