Taobao shop proprietors are generally held to be glamorous entrepreneurs, people who don't have to go to real offices every day to work. They are thought to have their own staff, and spend their time visiting wholesale outlets, driving luxury cars and living the life of superstars. In reality, most Taobao shop proprietors spend a lot of time on the Internet, work seven days a week, and have no life outside of their shops. With increased competition and stricter trading laws, life as a Taobao shop proprietor is far from glamorous.

The incentive remains - there are 214 million online shoppers in China, 42 percent of the number of Internet users in the country. But there are an estimated 6.5 million Taobao shop owners. Sunday's Singles Day sales saw Taobao shops rake in 19.1 billion yuan ($3.06 billion) in 24 hours, three times the volume of last year's Singles Day.

The real people

The Global Times looks at some of the real people behind the blinking AliWangWang icon (the instant messaging tool developed by Alibaba).

Research conducted by Taobao and the Center for Sociological Research and Development Studies of China and released in September shows that 67.2 percent of Taobao shop proprietors were born in the 1980s, 45.8 percent don't employ staff, and 33 percent spent at least nine hours a day working.

Jiang Huiping fits this description. The 26-year-old mother of a 3-year-old girl sells clothes on Taobao and for her it is a full-time job. In fact, only 31.9 percent of Taobao proprietors work at their shops full time. Her husband opened the business after they were married and had a baby in November 2009.

When the Taobao business began to bloom Jiang looked carefully at her then full-time job as a sales assistant in Jing'an district. She was commuting from her suburban Fengxian district home to downtown Jing'an every day, a daily 80-kilometer round trip. She finally decided to leave her job and joined her husband in the Taobao business. This gave her time to look after her baby, who was the most important thing in her life.

"If we had been better-educated or lived downtown, I still could have ended up doing a mediocre but steady job," Jiang told the Global Times. More than 60 percent of the Taobao shop proprietors are high school or college graduates. The research suggested that to some extent, Taobao was serving as a buffer zone for young job hunters.

Jiang's store first sold toys - most Taobao traders start with what they personally like - and when she discovered there was not enough turnover she went into clothes. Clothes are one of the more profitable online businesses but this market segment is also one of the most highly competitive with 38 percent of Taobao's shops selling clothes or cosmetics.

Jiang and her husband meet all kinds of customers from across the country on the Internet every day. And some are "very difficult to deal with." "Just recently a customer told me that a shirt he had bought three months ago became wrinkled after it had been washed several times, and he said he would complain to Taobao," Jiang said with a smile. "When I started I used to get very angry at these people, but I had to be nice because I can't risk getting bad ratings."

Jiang said the idea of quitting the business crossed her mind several times in the early days, but she and her husband supported each other through the bad periods. An earlier Taobao report noted that 90 percent of Taobao shops' customer services staff have been verbally abused by buyers. 

"It's essential that you have a positive attitude and someone to support you so you can get it out of your system, otherwise it is very easy to think about giving up or becoming depressed," Jiang said.

Although they have not employed any staff yet, Jiang gives herself regular breaks away from the "shop" and Shanghai. Some weekends she and her husband visit other cities in the Yangtze River Delta. "I have to get out sometimes to reward myself," she said. But even as they drive around sightseeing, they have their laptops and portable WIFI with them, ready to talk to customers if AliWangWang rings.

She is reluctant to reveal exactly how much she makes from the shop, preferring to quote the Taobao maxim: "If you can't manage to make a five-digit profit every month, then Taobao is not for you."

Just a hobby

Unlike Jiang, Tan Li is past the stage where she does all the packaging and customer service on her own. She rents a three-bedroom apartment, three floors down from her Hongkou district home, and hires nine customer service workers who get paid between 3,500 and 5,500 yuan a month which is above the average pay for this work.

After graduating from a university in Canada in 2008, Tan returned to Shanghai and worked in a technology company. As a hobby she opened a Taobao shop to sell unused and unwanted pieces that she had collected during her years abroad.

At first she only wanted to make extra cash by selling these but in only three months, she had loyal customers asking her to fetch cosmetics for them from Hong Kong when she visited.

"I sold everything I had bought soon after I came back from Hong Kong. That was when I figured that this could be lucrative," she said. She asked flight attendant friends to start bringing her items from Hong Kong to sell but when the authorities began cracking down on this form of importing she found other suppliers. But it was hard work in those days. "I packed and shipped the goods after I got home from work and talked to customers till midnight, then did the inventory till 2 or 3 am, and got up for work at 7 am."

This was alright until a year later when her company moved from downtown to Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park. This meant she faced a three-hour daily commute and was having problems getting her products to her customers in time.

"I had to decide whether to give up my job or give up Taobao. There was a heated discussion within my family. My father insisted it was better for a woman to have a stable job, while my mother encouraged me to stay with my own business because whatever job I took, I had to work for someone else, but with Taobao I could be the boss."

She wound up eventually leaving her job. By that time her Taobao shop had already earned four "crowns," a rating that signified considerable success. Soon afterwards she began hiring staff to help her. Today her shop brings in 2 to 3 million yuan a month and she reports a 5 percent profit.

Like Jiang she was also troubled by complaining customers who questioned the authenticity of her products and demanded refunds even after they had used the products. Some would spend hours on the phone complaining no matter how she explained herself.

"I used to get so upset that I often offered to meet these people and take them to counters in shopping malls to test the products. Nowadays I just take it easy. I ask them to courier the packages back to me. I use the returned products myself," Tan said.

For her, business is getting tougher with many other outlets selling the same products at similar prices, or even lower to attract customers.

Although many of her customers have complained because she doesn't do any shipping on Saturdays - she takes Saturdays off and in the last National Day holiday managed a vacation abroad.

Clothes and cream

 Lu Yijun is not so much a trader as a Taobao opportunist. The 26-year-old began selling clothes in 2006. Then she found Taobao wholesalers who were selling face cream for a low price which she bought and sold for an easy profit. This quickly made her around 10,000 yuan a month while her daytime job only paid 2,000 yuan.

"I thought to myself, why not stay home and run a Taobao shop when what I earn at work is such a small amount and involved so much effort? I enjoy the whole process where I get to take pictures of my products, pose as a model, use Photoshop to touch up the pictures, write product descriptions, and decorate my store - plus every penny I earn is mine. This gives me a lot more satisfaction than my old job."

She is not keen to take her Taobao store to a higher level. "I enjoy this and I don't fancy hiring people to work for me. That would be too complicated."

She has had different shops selling a range of products including cosmetics, clothes and contact lenses. But when contact lens selling on the Internet was banned, Taobao closed that outlet.

"You have to have time, energy and good partners for it to work," Lu said. "More importantly you should have the right products - products that distinguish you from other shops."

She plans to sublet her online shop to a friend and will open a wedding dress store instead. "Taobao is becoming more and more competitive and cosmetics are in a low-profit category. Making money depends on the quantity you sell."

Different approaches

Other Taobao proprietors approach trading differently. Some keep it as a part-time venture. Liao Nie works in environmental engineering and like 70 percent of the Taobao shop proprietors, runs his business part time. He sells men's clothing and although he only makes about 2,000 yuan a month, he can see it developing.

"E-commerce is definitely growing and it will be a bigger share of the market in the future. I want to be a part of it," Liao told the Global Times.

Even though it's not a full-time job, he works hard. He literally never turns his computer off. He and his wife, who has just had a baby, spend about 20 hours a day online.

"If Taobao was a street in the virtual world, then we are the street vendors, and T-mall stores are the real shops that pay taxes. If Taobao tightens the rules, it will be harder for us small shop proprietors," he said.

For a few, Taobao is not so much a trading place but a life experience and a platform for making friends. Qiu Jia, for example, sells her own craft works and helps charities online.

She opened her shop in December 2010 selling unused accessories she had bought and later she discovered how to combine her hobbies and her charity work. She likes traditional paper-cutting and makes things like postcards out of papercuts. Any money made from this goes to organizations that help stray cats and dogs.