Huang Bing, a 28-year-old chemical engineering graduate, is modest about the thousands of dollars he brings in each day selling lotions, mascaras and masks on China’s leading online auction site.
Huang’s store on Taobao.com has had much success since the soft-spoken entrepreneur, who now employs 30 people, launched it alone two years ago. Huang, a former sales representative for a state-owned pharmaceutical company, now sells up to 50,000 yuan (US$7,300) in make-up each day on Taobao. He stores his goods in an 800 square meter (8,600 square foot) warehouse in Hangzhou, the scenic Chinese city where Taobao and its parent company, Alibaba Group, are headquartered.
But Huang says the success of his store is small compared to others on Taobao.
“Many people have done this much better than me,” Huang said in his booth at an Alibaba trade show in Hangzhou. “Many are younger than me.”
Huang is one of many young Chinese who have created full-time jobs for themselves on Taobao, often reselling products bought wholesale from manufacturers. Taobao created employment for 570,000 people selling items on the site last year, Chinese Internet consultancy iResearch estimates.
Taobao has boomed as Internet access has spread in China and more users have started buying everyday items online. The e-commerce site, which allows users to sell items either at auction or in online retail stores, reported a transaction volume equivalent to $11.8 billion in the first half of this year, a nearly twofold rise from one year earlier. The most popular items bought on the site include laptops, mobile phones, make-up and clothes.
Companies are also increasingly turning to e-commerce to reach more buyers in China, Daniel Zhang Taobao’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. Major brands like Lenovo, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard all have stores on the same Taobao retail platform used by entrepreneurs like Huang.
“The coming one or two years will be a golden period of the online business,” said Zhang. “Today more and more people realize that they cannot wait, they have to explore this new market.”
Taobao has aggressively expanded its services for companies to draw them onto the site, said Dave Carini founder of technology consultancy Maverick China Research.
“Taobao really is more of a combination of eBay and Amazon,” Carini said.
