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Tmall is Alibaba’s answer to Amazon in China
One of the biggest stars in Alibaba’s online retail empire, Tmall found its niche by selling foreign imports and premium domestic goods to Chinese consumers. The site hosts third-party merchants instead of selling directly to shoppers.
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
In April 2019, around 15 years after it first purchased a Chinese shopping site that would later become Amazon China, the American retail giant finally announced it would stop running its China marketplace. The failure didn’t come as a surprise: Many Chinese consumers had been attached to homegrown platforms for a while, with Tmall being one of the most popular.
Tmall started as a spinoff from Alibaba’s Taobao. Both platforms make money by taking a cut of each sale from third-party merchants. But while Taobao helps mom-and-pop stores sell online, Tmall hosts larger merchants and established brands.
“FASHIONABLE AND SEXY”
Even in its earliest years, Alibaba had intended Tmall to be a venue for premium brands. If Taobao is your neighborhood flea market, then Tmall is positioned to be, well, a mall.
Then president Daniel Zhang (now Alibaba CEO) had high hopes for the new venture. In 2012, he told reporters that the Chinese name of Tmall -- Tianmao, which translates as “sky cat” -- is supposed to sound “fashionable and sexy”.
(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)
It quickly became a major destination for online shoppers in China. In 2014, just two years after it launched as an independent site, Tmall took hold of more than 60% of the market, according to iResearch. It still retained more or less the same share by the last quarter of 2018, Analysys data showed, ranking ahead of JD.com and Suning.
Tmall hawks an astounding variety of goods to over 650 million shoppers across Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms, including on Taobao where users can also search for items sold on Tmall. Not every product might strike you as fashionable or sexy. But they are almost invariably household names or high-end imports: Think North Face jackets, Colgate toothpaste, Japanese diapers and Australian wagyu beef.
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