By Zhu Shanshan

As China’s largest e-commerce website, taobao.com broke record sales of 80.9 billion yuan in the first half of this year. Some online users are seeking to make a fortune from Taobao, which in Chinese means “looking for treasure”. Unlike Taobao shop sellers, there is an emerging online group of sales people who help Taobao shop owners promote their products.

Alibaba group, which has several e-commerce websites catering to B2B and C2C, set up an online advertising trading website in 2007 called Alimama, in which Taobao sellers could post their information to potential online sales people. The word taobaoke, or online seller was born from this online platform.

Starting as a part-time taobaoke in 2008, Dai Rengguang was one of the first batch of taobaoke who grabbed the opportunity to make a fortune promoting other people’s products or services. He spent two hours after work everyday to browse Alimama to seek Taobao shops which needed online sales promotions for their products.

By clicking his mouse, Dai picked products he felt had “high quality” from credible Taobao shops and then organized the information into different categories and sent it to online forums or through QQ which is the largest online chatting tool in China.

Once an online shopper successfully bought a product or service via Dai’s promotion which can be traced through a code in the link Alimama provides for taobaoke, Dai could get 1.5 percent to 50 percent commission fee of the price tag.

“Taobaoke is just like a real estate agent who helps house buyers find a landlord and a dream home. We just earn a small commission fee by sorting this information out,” Dai said.

During the first few months, Dai could only make hundreds of yuan a month by sending ads to forums. But after setting up a website exclusively introducing Taobao sellers’ wares, Dai committed himself to managing his website and now earns 10,000 yuan every month. 

“Taobaoke is very effective since it doesn’t cost you a cent unless a buyer successfully purchases a product through the link. It’s like a sale without a base salary,” said Huang Haizhou, a veteran Taobao clothing seller based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province who uses taobaoke services for his shop.

By the end of June this year, Taobao had 145 million registered members, or 45 percent of China’s 318 million Internet users, the largest in the world. As it gaining more and more popular in China, it’s getting harder for Taobao sellers to stand out from the crowd. Literally.

In order to compete with other Taobao sellers, Huang posts his request for promotion on Alimama. He may have dozens of online sales people who are promoting his products at the same time, but Huang only needs to pay 10 percent of his earnings to those successful in persuading online shoppers to shell money out from their wallets.

“The competition on Taobao is very fierce. It’s hard to get profits without any promotion since there are so many sellers opening shops online and everyone is using his or her own methods to drum up sales,” said Huang, indicating some sellers are adopting improper methods.

As Taobao’s free platform allows sellers to start their businesses at a low cost, this benefit led to a loophole discovered afterwards, in that sellers could fake transactions and increase their trading volumes so as to attract more buyers.

According to Taobao’s rule, if a seller successfully sells out of an item and gets good feedback rated as “good”, “average” and not “bad”, the shop could accumulate one point. Based on rating system, the higher score you get, the better credibility the seller might gain.

Therefore, some Taobao sellers began purchasing large amounts of their own products, and accordingly their transaction volumes shot up. Meanwhile companies that help Taobao shops fake their transactions have been arising.

In 2007, if a shop owner paid speculation companies 10,000 yuan, it could help the shop upgrade from nothing to a “crown” which symbolizes the shop has successfully sold at least 100,000 items and received 100 percent good feedback at the same time, according to Du Pengyun, owner of the former biggest speculation company webgle.com.

As more and more speculation companies joined in the game, the price to buy credibility lowered to 7,000 yuan from 8,000 yuan in 2008 and then slashed to hundreds of yuan this year, said Du.

It’s not until recently that many Taobao patrons found out the scoring of a shop’s credibility they had previously trusted could be artificially created.

“I used to trust “crown” sellers since they had to sell so many products and receive approvals in the meantime. But now I know some of their credibility are faked. I am more cautious about choosing shops and products now,” said Huang Xuan, a regular Taobao customer.

To stamp out fraud and prohibited deals, Taobao launched a series of actions to check online fake transactions including updating the system this June to identify fraudulent dealings more efficiently. As of July 21, 9,777 shops were shut down due to their fraudulent actions to boost their credibility.

Now under strict scrutiny, faking scores seems risky and difficult, which is why many Taobao shop owners turn to taobaoke instead.

There are more than 100,000 taobaoke in China by the end of 2008, according to Alimama and the number keeps rising. But not everyone plays fair.

“Many taobaoke just copy and paste information and send them to as many websites as they can. But that kind of publicity is not that effective,” said Dai, who quit his full-time job as a website designer this September to concentrate on being a taobaoke.

To retain more online shoppers, Dai does a lot research on each shop he recommends, and he devotes time to polishing and promoting his own website which he aims to make as a professional consumer site.

“I want to be a responsible online salesman so that those who purchased goods and are satisfied due to my help can rely on me and revisit my website,” he said, now planning to register a company providing online business services for Internet users.