As someone who lives in Shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. However, as an expat who can't speak Chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.
Need something simple and don't know where to get it? If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."
The issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. Images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough Chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. I've set aside an hour before to make an account but I could not complete the task.
I wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation.
> If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."
LOL! That's exactly the answer I would give you :)
> Images have critical text that isn't translated
This is mostly down to the vendors themselves, who define the text and images that show on the item listing.
> often the page loads elements after translation has finished
Yes, you can't parse a Taobao page before waiting for JavaScript stuff to complete. I believe this is in large part to thwart scraping.
> I wonder how much effort .. to .. smooth out the experience
I'm sure they have the engineering capability to do it. They've built an amazing site (experience, scalability, reliability) and developed some cutting-edge stuff to do it (like tengine). The thing is, why would you make your site easier for robots to parse, thereby increasing your costs and polluting the data you use for analytics?
Thanks for the offer, though I actually prefer to only ask for help when I need it. Otherwise, my apartment will fill up with cheap Chinese goods, like the Shanzhai iPhone 6 I bought 2 months ago for absolutely no good reason. :P
While Taobao can be a treasure trove, an important warning is that around 90% of the brand-name items are fakes. As long as you're not after brand names, there are a lot of great bargains. If you want to buy geniune imported goods, better use T-Mall or JD.com. Neither of which will 100% guarantee you authentic goods, but the chance of getting fakes is much lower because sellers have to put up large deposits before selling.
It's not so much about appearance as about safety. Do you want your replacement laptop power supply to burn up? Are you sure that chocolate was made to the same standards as those of the brand owner? Even for clothing, North Fakes are highly unlikely to live up to the quality of the real deal.
I bought an extra laptop power supply for my Macbook Pro from Taobao. It cost 16 USD, and works well and looks like the original. It's probably of reasonable quality, but without the big brand behind it, I don't feel comfortable leaving it on unattended.
I've never thought to buy chocolate from Taobao, and I probably never will, unless it's from the official Tmall store of the brand owner, e.g. http://godiva.tmall.com/
I heard about a guy who bought a fake North Face jacket from the Silk Market or Yaxiu or somewhere similar. It rained a few days later and the jacket was soaked through :(
I had a fake Lenovo power supply burn on me. Couldn't tell it was a fake except by the price being pretty low.
I purchased "Toblerone" chocolate on Taobao and it came unboxed (just a foil wrapper) and didn't taste the same.
I've seen fake clothing that lasted for years and was probably worth the price paid, but I've also seen too many items fall apart. Personally, I won't buy fakes, but I will by Chinese brands if the reviews are good. We have a few items with Chinese names, like a blender and juicer, that were half the price of other brands but quality is quite decent.
Im live in australia and speak only english and I regularly search and have occasionally bought items from Taobao, including bicycle wheels, motorbike parts and something else that escapes me right now.
I use chrome with auto tranlation turned on, i first translate my keywords in google translate and then paste these into the taobao to search.
I'd buy more things if i could find a reliable third party onseller to deal with - the last one was an incredible ripoff when it came to posting ground freight.
If anyone has a reliable onseller, im open to suggestions!
I'd definitely be interested in talking further, tweet me @chriscbourke - I've been toying with a few ideas for a curated marketplace for international orders, i'll run them by you if you're interested!
Great to see someone going into detail on this- the Taobao experience is awesome. There are a few flakey carriers but over all- nothing even close in the US. It's become my favorite thing about living in China.
I usually buy only from sellers which have already sold lots of the particular item in question, with good feedback. The ability to see sales volume and feedback for a particular _listing_, and not just a particular SKU or particular seller, really makes my life easier.
A few of the things I've bought from Taobao recently:
These prices include delivery to Beijing. I converted the CNY prices to USD only to make them easier to understand.
I have heard that some Taobao vendors do ship internationally, but I have no knowledge of this, and have only heard it indirectly from overseas Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, then dealing with unusual requests or customisation can be hard, because it's all done through the online chat system, and 99.99% of vendors only speak Chinese.
Speaking of Strawberry Music Festival, there's one next week (October 2nd and 3rd) in Dali ... anyone fancy a trip to Yunnan for an HN China meetup? :) Feel free to get in touch, email in profile.
Nice, I wish we could have Taobao in the West, or at least be able to browse it in English. I've read elsewhere that many Chinese run Taobao stores as a "national hobby".
I've heard that some people browse and buy using Google Translate. I imagine it's difficult (because listings include lots of text embedded in images) but better than nothing :)
You're right, but I was suggesting using it for Chinese to English, not English to Chinese.
For product descriptions written in Chinese (especially long ones), an automated English translation can be good enough for the reader to make a purchase decision.
Need something simple and don't know where to get it? If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."
The issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. Images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough Chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. I've set aside an hour before to make an account but I could not complete the task.
I wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation.