August 13, 2016
“In the United States, eBay served an online population of more than 100 million and could count on a well-developed credit card market and reliable nationwide courier services. In China, the much-vaunted online consumer market of 10 million was a mirage. ”
August 13, 2016
“Few people could pay online or access reliable delivery services. More fundamentally there was a complete absence of trust in online shopping. Banking regulations restricted the development of credit cards, which were only allowed in 1999, their use restricted to customers who kept money on deposit in their banks. Debit cards were beginning to gain popularity but each bank issued its own card and there was no central processing network for merchants”
August 13, 2016
“In response, EachNet limited its initial auction offerings to the city of Shanghai, where it had set up physical trading booths for customers to meet.”
August 13, 2016
“Product quality issues were also tricky to overcome. In the States, eBay had pioneered a system that allowed consumers to rate vendors, but in China unscrupulous vendors quickly figured out they could game the system by using masses of fake accounts to drive up their positive ratings, or dilute their negatives. ”
August 13, 2016
“EachNet clearly was in for a long haul, not projecting any profits until 2005. EachNet’s prospects of raising new venture capital investment dimmed further. Bo and his investors realized that their best shot at making EachNet the eBay of China was to sell out to eBay itself.”
August 13, 2016
“Where next? eBay had more success in South Korea12 and Taiwan,13 but only China could really move the needle. By 2002, China’s Internet population had grown to over 27 million, the world’s fifth largest.14 Whitman was earlier than many in Silicon Valley to recognize the importance of China: “With the demographics and incredible changes in China, our hypothesis is this could be one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world,” she told the media, projecting $16 billion in e-commerce revenue by 2006.”
August 13, 2016
“eBay didn’t just want to back EachNet; it wanted to buy it. The initial deal15 gave eBay one-third of the company but also an option to take full control, which it did just fifteen months later, taking its total outlay to $180 million. Rebranded eBay EachNet, the company became a vessel for eBay’s China aspirations. The decision to own EachNet outright set the stage for Alibaba’s triumph, and eBay’s humiliation.”
August 13, 2016
“Why did things go so wrong so fast? Even though Whitman had granted Bo a generous allocation of options, making EachNet a subsidiary inevitably changed the dynamics with managers at eBay. Soon after the acquisition, for family reasons Bo had to move to California, which Meg Whitman was very generous in facilitating, as Bo had recounted to me in 2015. He stayed involved in the business, but the long distance between San Jose and Shanghai started to show. With Bo no longer in Shanghai, the head of marketing in the United States began to tell marketing in China what to do, and the head of technology did the same.”
August 13, 2016
“With the acquisition, eBay had dented EachNet’s entrepreneurial culture. The damage was revealed when another entrepreneurial company arrived on the scene: Alibaba. Worse still, Alibaba had the backing of SoftBank, the author of eBay’s defeat at the hands of Yahoo Japan.”
August 13, 2016
“Alibaba launched its preparations to enter China’s consumer e-commerce market in 2002, initially as a defensive move sparked by eBay’s entry. As Jack later explained, “I needed to stop eBay to protect Alibaba.” Although EachNet was targeting consumers, not the businesses served by Alibaba, Jack was concerned that some of the larger merchants active on EachNet could encroach on Alibaba’s turf: “At that time, there were only two companies in China that understood online marketplaces, eBay and Alibaba.”
August 13, 2016
“Jack’s plans to target consumers encountered resistance within Alibaba. The B2B business wasn’t yet profitable, and the VC market was closed for the time being. Could the company really afford to open a new front when they were still fighting the B2B battle? Was Jack just being paranoid?”
August 13, 2016
“CTO John Wu adamantly opposed the idea, visiting Jack the night before the new project was kicked off. John warned Jack that the move would harm Alibaba: “How on earth could you fight against eBay?” Jack replied that the market was still open: “There are one hundred million Internet users today, but only five million people are doing online shopping.” Jack’s ambitious plans for Alibaba also gave him a different perspective: “eBay wants to buy the Chinese market, but we want to create China’s Internet trading market.”
August 13, 2016
“ Jack also understood the temptation for eBay, later reflecting, “We launched Taobao not to make money, but because in the U.S. eBay gets a lot of its revenue from small businesses. We knew that someday eBay would come in our direction.”
August 13, 2016
“The new business was to be named19 “hunting for treasure,” or taobao in Chinese. Taobao.com’s tagline was “There is no treasure that cannot be hunted out, and there is no treasure that cannot be sold.”
August 13, 2016
“The SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus outbreak started in southern China in 2002, spreading to create clusters of infection around the world that caused eight thousand people to fall sick as well as almost eight hundred deaths.”
August 13, 2016
“In Hangzhou, four hundred employees in Alibaba’s head office underwent voluntary isolation at home after one of their colleagues, Kitty Song (Song Jie), fell ill with a suspected case of SARS. ”
August 13, 2016
“ In a letter to employees distributed that day, Jack’s ability to inspire the troops, and to keep them focused on the company’s goals, was on full display: “We care for each other and we support each other. We never forget the mission and obligation of Alibaba, in face of the challenge from SARS. Tragedy will pass, but life will continue. Fighting with catastrophe cannot prevent us from fighting for the enterprise we love.”
August 13, 2016
“The virus gave a major boost to texting, which increased business for cellular companies like China Mobile. However, SARS also boosted the three Chinese Internet portals thanks to revenue-sharing agreements with the telecom company. As the shares in Sina, Sohu, and NetEase began to climb, investor interest in Chinese technology companies was suddenly reignited. ”
August 13, 2016
“The suspected case of SARS within the company turned out not to be infected by the virus after all, and so for Alibaba, SARS ended up a blessing in disguise. Because the Taobao stealth team had relocated to work in the Lakeside apartment, they were not affected by the quarantine of the main office. Jack was still confined at home and unable to join the Taobao team for the May 10 launch, as he later recalled, “A few of us agreed to talk on the phone at eight P.M. and raised our glasses in the air and said ‘Wishing Taobao a safe journey.’ The day that Taobao was launched there was a line on the website that declared, ‘Remembering those who worked hard during SARS.’”
August 13, 2016
“Taobao’s association with Alibaba was kept so well hidden that a number of Alibaba employees even voiced concerns to management about a potential new rival on the scene. Jack recalled, “We have a very active intranet. In late June, someone posted a message asking the company’s senior management to pay attention to one website, which might become our competitor in the future.” Soon the Alibaba intranet was alive with discussions about who was behind Taobao, and employees commenting on the disappearance of some of their colleagues. Finally, on July 10, 2003, Alibaba announced that Taobao was part of the company. “There was a resounding cheer within the company,” Jack recalled.”
August 13, 2016
“With the backing of SoftBank, Jack took a move from Yahoo Japan’s playbook. In 1999, when it launched its e-commerce business, CEO Masahiro Inoue asked his 120 employees to list items for sale on his new site to make it look active and popular. Four years later in China, Jack did the same: “We had all together seven, eight people [in the Taobao team]. . . . Everyone had to find four items. I rummaged through my chests and cupboards. I barely had anything at home. . . . We pooled about thirty items, and I bought yours and you bought mine, that’s how it started. . . . I even listed my watch online.”
August 13, 2016
“This transaction also was the end of the road for Goldman Sachs. Shirley Lin had left the bank in May 2003. With no one to oversee the stake, Goldman had written down the value of its stake to zero. The following year, just before the new investment led by SoftBank, Goldman sold off its entire 33 percent stake. The bank had paid $3.3 million for it in 1999 and sold it for more than seven times that amount five years later.”
August 13, 2016
“Jack reveled in being ignored. “During the first year, eBay didn’t consider us their rival. They didn’t even think that we could be their rival. They thought, We haven’t even heard about Alibaba. Such a strange name. Chinese all know what tao bao means, foreigners don’t.”
August 13, 2016
“China was considered so important that managers, keen to present a positive story to Whitman and other senior executives, made sure that everything looked great on PowerPoint and sounded smooth on conference calls. But thanks to its own missteps as well as Alibaba’s competitive moves, this was increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground.”
August 13, 2016
“eBay’s biggest mistake was in getting the culture wrong. A “leave it to the experts” attitude demoralized the original EachNet team in Shanghai, as eBay executives were parachuted in from headquarters in San Jose or other parts of the eBay empire. No matter how skilled the new arrivals, most spoke no Chinese. They faced a steep learning curve to understand the local market.”
August 13, 2016
“In website design, culture matters. In the West, websites like Google had become popular for their clean lines and uncluttered “negative space.” But to the mass market of Chinese Web users, accustomed to pop-ups and floating banner ads, they seemed static and dull. As you can see for yourself by opening taobao.com, successful Chinese websites are typically packed with information and multimedia graphics, requiring many scroll-downs to see the whole page. From its outset Taobao has been a website built by Chinese for Chinese. And it worked.”
August 14, 2016
“For companies like eBay and Amazon, their experience in the United States and other Western markets proved to be of little use. “E-commerce in China is very strange,” the rival e-commerce founder continued. “It started with C2C (consumer-to-consumer) and with nonstandardized products. This was unlike Amazon, unlike the conventional wisdom where you need to start with standardized products, like books.”
August 14, 2016
“The more standardized the supply chain, the higher the barriers for e-tailers. All the smaller, mom-and-pop stores selling nonstandardized products are more accommodating, more flexible in supplying goods. That’s unique to China. The lack of national supply chains removed the barriers to entry that exist in the West, making it possible for individuals to make money.22 By starting with C2C, it made the price factor very appealing.”
August 14, 2016
“Meanwhile, Taobao’s decision to forgo charging fees was not without risk, since it forced it to look to other ways of generating revenues, especially if the site became popular and drove up operating costs. But making the site free for both shoppers and merchants turned out to be the key factor in ensuring Taobao’s triumph over eBay. A research paper25 that analyzed more than a decade’s worth of transaction data on Taobao concludes26 that in the early phase of the company’s history, attracting merchants, who in China are especially allergic to paying fees, was more important than attracting shoppers. Taobao’s popularity was fueled by a “virtuous circle”: More merchants and product listings meant more shoppers were attracted to the site, which meant more merchants and products, etc.”
August 14, 2016
“As Taobao charged no fees, they had no incentive to police this behavior. On the contrary, Taobao actively encouraged communications between the transacting parties by setting up bulletin boards and, beginning in June 2004, launching an embedded, proprietary chat window with the unfortunately in English named AliWangwang.27 Buyers on the site use the service to haggle with sellers, which resonates well with the vibrant marketplace culture in China. Communication is a key underpinning of commerce, but eBay users struggled to communicate with vendors.”
August 14, 2016
“government’s long-standing efforts to build and extend the “Great Firewall of China” often means websites hosted overseas are much slower to load than those hosted in China itself. All Web traffic accessing sites hosted outside the mainland has to go through a series of chokepoints where the request is screened. This is to ensure that a foreign website does not display material the Chinese government deems “sensitive,” including the “three T’s” (Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen Square).”
August 14, 2016
“eBay had its reasons for the migration. As the business grew in China, the engineers in San Jose worried whether the platform built by a Shanghai-based start-up could cope. It turned out that EachNet had built robust technology, capable of scaling up by even a hundred times. But after a series of site outages that had damaged its reputation at home, eBay had become obsessed with the stability of its platform.”
August 14, 2016
“As predicted, as soon as the China site was migrated ”
August 14, 2016
“and integrated into the global site, the impact on EachNet’s traffic was disastrous: It dropped off precipitously. Customers in China started to experience long delays and time-outs on the site. Why would they bother to wait for eBay in China—a site that charged fees—when Taobao was available instantly and for free?”
August 14, 2016
“ Changing one word on the site would take nine weeks. Changing one feature would take one year.
How could eBay be so inefficient? There are two explanations. First, eBay had an effective monopoly in the States, and this bred complacency. Second, despite its Silicon Valley aura, eBay was never very strong at technology. One eBay executive famously once said, in public, “Even a monkey could run this business.” After the embarrassing site outages, stability and process trumped technology.”
August 14, 2016
“Looking back on the fiasco eight years later in her new role as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Meg Whitman was contrite about eBay’s missteps in China. “You’ve got to have a set of products uniquely designed for this market by Chinese. It is not a market where you can take a product or a system that works in Europe or the United States and export to China.”
August 14, 2016
“From the moment he conceived of Taobao, Jack maintained a relentless focus on the company. In a much-quoted analogy, Jack commented to Forbes magazine in 2005, “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose, but if we fight in the river, we win.”
August 14, 2016
“eBay just wouldn’t take Alibaba seriously, questioning the reliability of mounting data that showed Taobao was selling more goods than eBay in China. Taobao now had more listings, but eBay convinced itself that because those listings were free they must be inferior. Jack vigorously rejected that thesis: “The survival and growth of Taobao are not because of free service. 1Pai [the joint venture of Yahoo and Sina] is also free but it is nowhere close to Taobao. Taobao is more eBay than eBay China [because] Taobao pays more attention to user experiences.”
August 14, 2016
“Whitman had reached the same conclusion and secretly began to look for a way out of the China morass. The most obvious route was to make an offer to buy Alibaba, and so she sent three senior executives28 from San Jose to Hangzhou, where they met Jack and Joe. The meeting got off to a bad start when eBay senior vice president Bill Cobb talked down Taobao’s achievements and CFO Rajiv Dutta offered a lowball number of $150 million to buy the company. After Jack told the eBay delegation that he was just getting started with Taobao, Joe countered with a sales price of $900 million, at which point the two sides parted company.”
August 14, 2016
“Having failed to buy its rival, Meg Whitman announced29 an infusion of an additional $100 million into its China operations.”
August 14, 2016
“This was music to Jack’s ears. He joked to Forbes magazine that eBay had “deep pockets, but we will cut a hole in their pocket.” Talking to Chinese media, he ridiculed the new investment: “When I heard that eBay would spend one hundred million dollars to break into this market, I didn’t think they had any technical skills. If you use money to solve problems, why on earth would the world need businessmen anymore. Businessmen understand how to use the smallest resources to expand.” Even with SoftBank’s backing, Jack didn’t have the resources that eBay could bring to China if it wanted. Dismissing eBay’s approach, he added, “Some say that the power of capital is enormous. Capital does have its power. But the real power is the power of people controlling the capital. People’s power is enormous. Businessmen’s power is inexhaustible.”
August 14, 2016
“Instead of picking AFT or PayPal, eBay had decided to go with both—meaning customers in China would have to navigate not one but two websites when buying online.
Not surprisingly, running two payment systems in parallel in China proved to be a disaster.”
August 14, 2016
“One customer even complained that his PayPal check was impounded by the Bank of China in Nanjing under a law to “prevent overseas criminals from money laundering through this method.” By the middle of 2005, Taobao had facilitated online payments for 80 percent of the products on its sites, but eBay barely 20 percent.”
August 14, 2016
“eBay had lost China. But in Jack, China had gained a folk hero. When asked today about the experience, Whitman can only tip her hat to Jack’s achievements.
“If you look at Japan and China, two important markets, it’s where we didn’t strategically, actually do the right thing. But it was not obvious at the time, honestly. So more power to Jack Ma, what a powerful franchise he has built—and it is really in some ways the combination . . . of eBay, PayPal, and Amazon. He’s done a remarkable, remarkable job.”
Notes From: Duncan Clark. “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.” iBooks.
