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"Online purchases made on two of China\u2019s largest shopping websites, Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com, increased by 600 percent last year, according to new figures published by its owner the Alibaba Group.\r\n\r\nThe report, summarized on Alizila, has revealed that the number of consumers who visited the two online marketplaces through a mobile device, either by an app or WAP browser, hit 300 million in 2012.\r\n\r\nNot all of those users were reaching the checkout though. The research also showed that only 57 million, or 19 percent, finished the transaction when accessing the service through a smartphone or tablet.\r\n\r\nIt shows that while the interest in Alibaba\u2019s ecommerce stores is high, consumer behaviour is increasingly shifting to a mobile-first approach, and there\u2019s still room for improvement when it comes to capitalizing on potential purchases.\r\n\r\nTo emphasize this, the total value attributed to purchases with a mobile device was not disclosed for the 12 month period.\r\n\r\nWe do know, however, that purchases with a mobile phone made up 6.87 percent of all transactions on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com throughout 2012.\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s not bad, given that mobile transactions made up only 1.77 percent in 2011. Some analysts have also estimated that Amazon\u2019s mobile sales represented between 5 and 8 percent of total purchases in 2012 - so Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com appear to be in touching distance.\r\n\r\nThe research also showed that on average, 220,000 products were sold every hour through a smartphone or tablet on the two ecommerce sites.\r\n\r\nAlex Qiu, Vice President and General Manager of the Mobile Business Unit at Alibaba Group - the parent company of Taobao and Tmall.com - said mobile adoption is much faster in China than it used to be.\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;Mobile is changing how people use the Internet, because it provides a different Internet experience,&amp;quot; he said.\r\n\r\nMore than a quarter (26 percent) of shoppers who accessed Taobao on a mobile device said they were searching for products, while 14.2 percent were tracking the estimated delivery or status of their package.\r\n\r\nTaobao also discovered that 9.28 million people had searched for products on a daily basis through Taobao Marketplace in 2012. On average, those users were searching 13 or 14 times per day.\r\n\r\nThe report also found that women were shopping on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com more than men. Last year, women spent an average of RMB 1757 ($283 USD), in comparison to RMB 1,144 ($184 USD)\u00A0for men.\r\n\r\nTaobao Marketplace is an influential online retailer, and the international community is starting to take notice. Earlier this year, Appconomy announced a Cloud Commerce Platform that helps private merchants on Taobao build custom mobile apps for their storefronts. It's but one way to attract new vendors, similar to the third-party offerings available on Amazon.\r\n\r\nIt also follows the news that\u00A0Jonathan Lu, Group Executive Vice President and Head of Data at Alibaba, is to replace\u00A0Jack Ma as the firm's CEO.\r\n\r\nImage Credit: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/03/15/alibabas-taobao-marketplace-and-tmall-com-stores-welcomed-300m-shoppers-through-a-mobile-device-last-year/>