Qihoo 360 Unveils B2C Sites Aggregator to Expand Revenue Sources

Who are the prime beneficiaries of the current ecommerce mania in China? To start off, consumers. They now have access to abundant choices with stunning price tags. Who else? Portals as well as website aggregators like hao123.com (acquired by Baidu) and hao.360.cn (by Qihoo 360). Why? They pull in considerable amount of money by promoting these ecommerce services on their virtual properties.

360.cn, the Chinese online security guard secretively unveiled a B2C services aggregator, collecting and featuring numerous B2C sites as well as items on mall.360.cn under different categories.

The first batch of online retailers got featured includes 360buy.com, Dangdang.com, VANCL, M18.com, Yihaodian.com, Joyo.com, Mbaobao.com and so on.

360.cn got listed on NYSE in late March of this year. Its prospectus shows that although positioned as an online security service, large chunk of the Beijing-based company’s revenue comes from online ads (67.3%) while only a small part of it comes from its core business – safeguarding people’s online experience.

Website aggregators – with similarities to Yahoo Directory in the early years of the U.S. internet era – still enjoys its prosperity in China while serving as umpteen people’s web gateway. hao.360.cn by Qihoo 360 has surpassed Baidu’s hao123 to become the No.1 aggregator with huge traffic which can be profitably leveraged as everyone knows that traffic is money.

That’s the main cause why Qihoo 360 launches the B2C sites aggregator as an ongoing part of Qihoo 360’s effort to diversify its revenue sources as well as take a bite from the well-funded ecommerce companies – while they still have VC money to slash.