Baidu Focuses More on Customer Need rather than Competitors

HANGZHOU, Jul 03, 2008 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) -- BIDU | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- "We are attracting sellers. And now our C2C service is free, we will consider kicking off charging service according to the practical situation," said Yu Jun, vice president of Baidu.com shortly after the biggest Chinese Internet search service provider made a push into the C2C e-commerce market.

When it comes to Taobao.com, the number one C2C website in China, the vice president says that Baidu focuses more on the demand and need of its customers rather than the moves of its competitors.

Industry experts, however, believe that Baidu has to pass the barrier set up by Taobao.com, because it holds more than 70% of the market.

As for Baidu, its biggest advantage is its vast user pool as most of 221 million Chinese Internet users are using the search service of Baidu. It hopes its C2C sector will make the best use of the advantage.

To get there, Baidu is sparing on effort to integrate all of its resources, especially the online community. First it has unified IDs and passports of subscribers to its various services.

Mr. Yu also disclosed that Baidu would have its own online payment platform that is in a similar fashion to Alipay, the online payment tool owned by Taobao.com.

Baidu lately kicked off a promotion event for its online trading platform in Beijing, in a bid to speed up the introduction of C2C business.

Baidu said that the company would also arrange promotion events in the major cities of Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta areas, as well as further radiating the campaign to other first and second tier cities.

Li Yanhong, CEO of Baidu, earlier said that the company would launch the C2C platform, but the platform would not yield any return and the initial outlay was unclear.

An analyst noted that the C2C E-commerce website and some online sellers also launch ads through Baidu. If the company launches the C2C business by itself, it should take some measures to assure the fairness of search engine results.

According to a research report of China IntelliConsulting Corporation, the turnover of domestic online shopping market arrived at CNY 59.4 billion last year, up 90.4 percent y-o-y and consumption per capita reached CNY 1,080 per year.

Analysts believe the online shopping market is going mature and the participation of Baidu would further sharpen the competition.

From www.nbd.com.cn, Page 1, Wednesday, July 02, 2008 info@SinoCast.com

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