Taobao Mobile Hit 300 Million Visitors in 2012
According to a lately released report (report in Chinese) by Taobao Mobile, last year its cumulative visitors hit 300 million, of which 57 million ever purchased items. The transactions through mobile went up by 6 times yoy, covering 6.87% of the total (1.77% in 2011). Here’s some interesting data from the report, let’s take a look.
An average of 9.28m users searched for items on Taobao Mobile daily, and in every single hour over 220,000 goods were sold through this platform.
Female shoppers are more willing to spend money by phones than their counterparts, with an average expenditure of RMB 1757 and RMB 1144, respectively. This gap doesn’t happen on PC users though. What’s funny is data show that, thanks to the baby boom in 2012 the year of dragon, a crowd of new mommies have grown a habit of shopping with phones very early in the morning (mostly at 3 a.m.)
On the other side, over 3.55m vendors received orders through mobile ends in the past year, an increase of 86.6% yoy. Noticeably the growth rate in mobile vendors in Guangdong province has been the most salient, which is as high as 107%. Also there are 18 vendors of the year who achieved over millions turnovers on mobile ends.
People from Zhoushan (a city near Hangzhou) spent most on Taobao Mobile last year with an average consumption of RMB 1721, which was higher than RMB 1630 in Shanghai. Some cities such as Guiyang (a southwestern city), Wenzhou (in Zhejiang province) ,Lhasa and Nyingchi (the last two are both in Tibet) surprisingly climbed to the top 10 cities with the greatest purchasing power.
Some of them even contributed more than people in Beijing or Guangzhou. The fastest growth rates, even higher than 146% which happens in first tier cities, were with Puyang (Henan Province) and Tongren (Guizhou Province). “In 2012, we have seen an obvious trend in user growth in third- and fourth-tier cities”, said Lu Zhongtao the MD of Taobao Mobile.
Early in this month, Alibaba’s financial subsidiary announced that it would launch a credit service in April, firstly, in Zhejiang and Hunan provinces. The consumer credit limit to be offered will be up to RMB 5000. It will only be available for mobile purchases, according to Hu Xiaoming, president Alibaba’s financial arm. He revealed that it is not just a copy of the traditional credit card mode, but aims to better serve the mobile payers. Data from Alipay shows that even there has been an upward trend in mobile trading, only 38% of the mobile users can successfully finish their orders. Hu predicted the credit payment could be reach somewhere between RMB 400m to 500m in this year.