When Etao made its first dubut in late last year, Taobao positioned and touted the service as a price engine for online buyers.
Taobao spun off Etao as an independent company in an aim to serve the best interests of online hunters by helping them find the best deal online through price comparison and more. In this month, Alibaba announced investing US$ 157 million (RMB 1 billion) into the Taobao portfolio, aiming to help boosting 3rd party ecommerce sites’ online exposure and traffic.
And actually, Etao is doing more than just price comparison, according to its CEO Wu Yongming, the Hangzhou-based service is more of a comprehensive online shopping decision engine that help customers finding deals through comparisons of price, service, payment, logistic and so on.
In the early years of Chinese ecommerce era, Taobao accounted for more than 80%of Chinese ecommerce market, there isn’t strong need for a service like Etao. And now with more than 10,000 B2C services cramping China’s online marketplace, deal hunters need a price engine to walk them through the online shopping journey.
Searching on Etao, you’ll find an item’s price range, price trends, product details, user reviews and so forth. These data is vital in shaping an informative buying decision.
Considering the huge traffic Etao can bring and its aggressive promotion planning, 3rd party sites would love to on board with the decision engine. And according to Etao, anyone is welcomed under the premise of adopting Alipay as one of their payment methods.
Etao has indexed more than 5,000 online ecommerce services and over 660 group buying sites.
Etao is also casting an eye on overseas market with the partnership with several South Korean online shopping sites.