Taobao in threat to close down
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Jack Ma, co-founder of Taobao.com, has told his staff he would rather shut down the trading platform than give in to a group of sellers attacking the platform.
Thousands of sellers have joined an online organization calling itself the "Anti-Taobao Alliance" and have been causing problems for other sellers by ordering all their goods and then cancelling them after a few days, in the meantime making the goods unavailable for sale.
Some of them are also clicking repeatedly on the advertisements of other vendors on Taobao.com's front page.
Each click raises the price vendors have to pay for advertising.
But the increased cost has caused many vendors to cancel their adverts, hitting the Chinese platform's income.
The reason for the organization's activities was made clear online by one of its leaders, calling himself "Anti-Taobao Warrior." He said their actions were to force Taobao to reconsider a new rule issued on July 8 which "only caters to the rich and large sellers while smaller vendors are suppressed."
But a Taobao official said the rule was issued to rearrange the sequence of search results and make more small shops available to buyers on the front page.
The original sequence depended on the deadline when the goods had to be sold. The closer to the deadline, the higher the products would be listed in the sequence and thus be more eye-catching.
Another sequence depended on the credibility ranking of shops.
"If you are an experienced seller, you can use the deadline wisely to easily make your products always be on the top of the search results," said the official. "But new sellers don't know anything about the trick and it's unfair to them."
She said the new sequence was arranged depending on an overall evaluation which included the shops' credibility level, delivery speed, customers' remarks and other elements.
The new method had brought 50 percent more business opportunities for more than 250,000 smaller shop sellers, she said, but many sellers still believed their business had suffered.
This was certainly the case where sellers had been involved in "ranking frauds" where they hired people to give fake rankings and remarks at their stores to hype their products.
The new search results sequence prevents them using credibility rankings alone to attract buyers.
"It's Internet terrorism," said one vendor, surnamed Zhang, a popular clothing seller who was among the sellers attacked by the alliance members. "Once their chance for competing in an inglorious way is gone, they start to bite innocent people."
Law expert Zhang Fan said the behavior of the alliance members violated public order and might even constitute a crime for disturbing the operation of companies, according to Law of Punishment in Public Order and Security Administration.
An official with Taobao said some sellers had reported the matter to the police and added that a number of cases were now under investigation.
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