Taobao to offer coupons, offline services
Shanghai Daily, December 4, 2014 Adjust font size:
Alibaba Group's consumer retail website Taobao will offer 2 billion yuan (US$325 million) worth of cash coupons to customers using mobile devices and has teamed up with as many as 10,000 third-party service providers to boost offline services.
Customers will be able to use the coupons by logging on to its mobile application through smartphones or tablets.
“Taobao's focus in the next stage is to make selling through mobile devices more convenient for vendors and we'll step up efforts to allow them to better leverage the huge traffic from mobile devices,” said Zhang Jianfeng, Taobao president.
It will also diversify its service offerings by working with housekeeping service providers, real estate developers, auto parts firms and dry cleaners.
About 43 percent of total sales on Singles Day on November 11 came from Taobao and Tmall's mobile applications. Currently, about half of Taobao and Tmall's shoppers visit the websites through mobile devices on an average day.
From this week, 8 million vendors on Alibaba's platforms will offer millions of specialty merchandise as part of the December 12 promotion campaign, which encourages individual vendors to offer personalized products and services to shoppers.
