What is the biggest mall in China?

What are the business dis/advantages for a bootstrapped online retails startup in China operating on Taobao Store vs. Taobao Mall vs. own brand's stand-alone website?

• In China where I have met recently with two newly formed lean startups doing online retails. One sets up directly on Taobao to leverage site's traffic within fierce competition clusters. Another plans to promote his own brand site with a very limited marketing budget. What are the learning curves for these small online retailers in China?

• Answer:

  First of all, take Taobao Mall out of the equation because for small teams with limited resources, it's not that different from the C2C platform, the only difference is that you end up paying Taobao more.  Let me elaborate on that from the shopper's perspective...  If you go to Taobao Mall and search for a flash drive, for example, you'd still see lots of sellers selling it which you may not feel entirely comfortable buying from.  That they are registered companies won't help make people feel too much better.  In short, Taobao Mall will only benefit big sellers (mostly name brands who can leverage their brands to win consumer trust), like P&G, L'Oreal, Uniqlo, etc etc. So if you're a small seller, you would choose from the C2C platform or running an independent shop...  I'd do both.  Taobao offers 2 solutions that allow you to create an independent site that syncs to your Taobao store -- so you only need to essencially manage just one store. But really Taobao's C2C isn't all that you might think it is...  (The glory days of small Taobao sellers are definitely long gone.) For those who don't have first hand experiences running a store on Taobao, you might think that it's like opening a store in a mall...  You will benefit from all the foot traffic in the mall...  Guess what, that does NOT happen on Taobao.  Whatever you can think of selling, trust me, there are a lot of other sellers offering the same or similar goods.  So you being a new player will not help you attract any attention.  When people search for a product, they will easily filter search results by the store's review ranking, or by the number of that item the sellers have sold.  In either case, your items won't come up high on the list.  You can forget about being found.  Even if you were found, people probably won't buy from you because they wouldn't trust you. It is important to take a step back and realize that Taobao's C2C platform, after all, is synonomous as cheap, fake and untrust-worthy... I'd say it follows the 80-20 rules... meaning 20% of the sellers making 80% of the money, except I'd guess the ratio may be even more lopsided... If you're gonna spend money promoting your online store... (and you will have to) then you might as well use it to promote an independent site. I have 10-month experience selling on Taobao.  I'm speaking from first hand experiences.  There are other things I wouldn't have known if I didn't try it myself...  Like most of my orders are placed during the day meaning people are shopping online at work...  Weekends also are bad for business.  There are other facts of life on Taobao you'd find out only if you try to operate a store on it. Running an independent site is a must for the long term.  You have a chance to shake off the stigma of Taobao C2C being a place selling cheap and fake goods.  And you can avoid the trolls of bargain hunters (average shoppers have surprisingly low medium monthly income.) and possibly give yourself a better gross margin. That's my two cents...