Alibaba’s Chinese eCommerce Platform Taobao Is Now Also Available in English

Taobao's New Language Integration: Key Insights

• Taobao Is Now Available in English: Alibaba's flagship C2C (consumer-to-consumer) eCommerce marketplace, Taobao, was previously only available in Chinese. It now integrates English site navigation and product descriptions.

• Taobao's International Presence: While the site's primary market is China, the size of Taobao's GMV ensures that even the smallest markets generate billions of dollars in marketplace activity. After the peak of the pandemic, revenues began to decline, so the new language integration could reach new consumer segments to revive sales.

Taobao is now also available in English! The flagship platform of the leading eCommerce conglomerate Alibaba is thereby serving its non-Chinese-speaking customers more directly, as the site was previously only available in Chinese. It has also integrated new currency conversions for international markets. Taobao is a C2C online marketplace, which is known for offering a wide range of products at low prices. 

While it is true that shoppers could use external translation services to understand the site navigation and listings, it has now become easier to shop on Taobao as a non-Chinese speaker. Taobao's product descriptions are translated by AI, which can lead to some funny results and misunderstandings. But overall, the move is expected to bring the shopping site closer to its international customers.

Taobao’s International Presence: Small Shares, High Profits

With a primary focus on China, only a very small percentage of the site’s GMV (gross merchandise volume) is generated abroad. The country breakdown on Taobao’s ECDB Profile shows that 95.8% of its GMV is generated in its home country of China. Other markets only account for minor shares, including South Korea (1%), Japan (1%), and Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand, where the shares are less than 1%. 

At first glance, these numbers seem low, but consider the sheer size of the site’s GMV: In 2023, US$506.6 billion worth of products were sold on Taobao. One percent equals US$5.1 billion, which is still significant when you consider that sites like apple.com generate US$3 billion in Japan.

Taobao's English launch comes at a time when GMV is on a downward trend, as the marketplace's activity peaked during the pandemic in 2021. The US$631.7 billion was not reached in the following years, as normalization after the pandemic led to a decline in online shopping volume. Providing international consumers with the ability to interact more directly with the site by removing language barriers could help reverse the trend. By 2025, ECDB analysts expect a slight improvement.

Sources: Hardwarezone.com