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Is Taobao planning to open up their service to the UK? And possibly have translations of their website? It seems that it is a very likely possibility given that Alibaba Group Holdings(based in the Cayman Islands) has applied for both UK and German trademarks for 'Taobao' and 'Alipay.' I can see that for them, this was the natural extension as they have already a huge amount of consumers in China and hopefully soon lots more outside of China.
I hope that this will mean that it will be easier for those of us outside of China to both buy and pay on Taobao. At the moment, if you are outside China, you could do as I did and topup your Alipay account before you leave China then negotiate with sellers to send things to your own country, obviously if it were possible to topup my Alipay account from England it would be even better.
The problem remains that a lot of the items on Taobao are unreliable, you have to message the seller/chat with them on the little programme to find out whether they have the item in stock, whether it's the same colour as the picture, what the condition is etc. For Taobao, the biggest hinderance to overseas non-Chinese speakers buying from them is in implementing systems so
that people who can't read Chinese can communicate with the sellers on
Taobao.
Perhaps there could be some way for Taobao sellers to 'opt-in' to receiving foreign buyers but in exchange they would have to either provide English descriptions or guarantee that the product is exactly the same as the picture.
Either way, I think that this will be a long and time-consuming process and perhaps the name 'Taobao' will be used in some other way in places outside of China.Not that I am a financial journalist, but I'd suggest if you could now is probably a good time to invest in Alibaba Group.
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