Netease discontinues its Luxury B2C marketplace Alibaba stock trading halted amid talks with Yahoo deal

Taobao Tmall changes name to Tian Mao

Posted by Aliuser on Jan 15, 2012 in B2C marketplace, C2C marketplace

To differenitate itself from Taobao.com, Alibaba Group has changed Taobao’s Tmall.com chinese name to 天猫. Tmall is designed for international brands to sell and promote their products in China while Taobao.com is currrently for China SMEs to sell retail products to customers online.

Following the name change, Tian Mao can be more defined and position itself as a business to consumer (B2C) platform while its big sister Taobao.com continue to focus more on consumer to consumer (C2C) marketplace.

Along with these two ecommerce vehicles, one should remember that Alibaba group of companies has launched its search engine Etao in November 2010. Etao, powered by MSN Bing, launched its Open Search Beta service by integrating other B2C website data in addition to Taobao.com.

Tmall, which marks its 4th anniversary, will keep its English name but change its Chinese name from Taobao Mall 淘宝商城 to 天猫. In pinyin, it’s known as Tian Mao literally means sky cat in Chinese.

Some market observers believe the name change set the stage for Tmall’s future IPO plans, but Tmall spokesperson Yan Qiao denied such a link.

”The name change has no relationship with a future IPO, and also Tmall doesn’t want to separate the brand from Taobao,” Yan said.

Although Tian Mao is entirely operated in Chinese, many international brands including Adidas, Nike, OLAY, LOREAL are promoting their products through the B2C ecommerce platform in China.

Taobao remains to be China largest C2C marketplaces so far.The number of Chinese who buy things on the Web today stands at 145 million and is expected to more than double to 329 million by 2015, accordint to Taobao Mall President Daniel Zhang.

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