Turnover at Tmall and Taobao tops 1 trillion yuan

Turnover of Tmall.com and Taobao.com, two major Chinese online shopping platforms, surpassed 1 trillion yuan (160.5 billion U.S. dollars) as of Nov. 30, according to e-commerce platform provider Alibaba Group on Monday.

Turnover of Tmall and Taobao during the first 11 months this year equals to 5.4 percent of China's total retail sales in 2011, which stood at 18.4 trillion yuan, according to Alibaba.

Company statistics show that people between the ages of 25 to 35, who are major customers of Tmall and Taobao, contributed to 59 percent of total turnover.

The most favored two categories of products by consumers were clothing, and 3C digital products (computers, communication and consumer electronics), accounting for 30.3 percent and 18.6 percent of the total turnover respectively.

About 800 million items are on sale at stores on the two online platforms that attract more than 60 million visitors a day. As many as 48,000 items are sold out every minute on Taobao.com alone.

Transaction volume on Taobao.com, which was founded in May 2003, reached 20 million yuan in that same year.

Alibaba split Taobao into three separate companies in 2011. They are Taobao, a C2C online shopping destination, Tmall, a B2C online marketplace for brand-name goods and eTao, a shopping search engine.

Transaction volume on Taobao and Tmall totaled about 630 billion yuan in 2011.

Tmall.com and Taobao.com's success represents the online shopping boom the country has witnessed during the past couple of years.

Apart from solid growth in revenues from major cities, consumers in the third- and fourth-tier cities are driving growth.

Revenues from 28 major cities nationwide jumped less than 40 percent year on year during the Jan.-Nov. period, while those from the third- and fourth-tier cities grew more than 60 percent, according to Alibaba.

Zeng Ming, chief strategic officer of Alibaba Group, said during the early period of Taobao, major cities contributed to most of the revenues, but now smaller cities are contributing a bigger share.

The e-commerce boom is bringing reforms to the fields of manufacturing, consumption and logistics. Meanwhile, it also serves as a major driver behind job creation and consumption boost.

Some small manufacturers are now making production plans according to orders received on e-commerce platforms. Alibaba has lent 19 billion yuan to small businesses in accordance with their operations on the two platforms.

The pair have helped create four million direct jobs, according to Alibaba.