REKURSIVE BLOG

Baidu online payments site baifubao.com is online

The C2C (customer to customer) ecommerce war in China is in full swing - the website of Baidu’s new online payment system Bai Fu Bao (百付宝) is now online. It currently only displays an announcement banner though and does not expose any functionality yet.

In the past week, it was announced that Taobao (the current leading China C2C e-commerce shopping/auctions site that potentially has the most to lose if Baidu’s e-commerce site is successful) has started blocking Baidu’s search engine spiders from indexing content on Taobao.com. I guess that by announcing this, Taobao is trying to tell its users to bypass Baidu’s search engine and go directly to Taobao.com.

Currently the most successful online payment systems are Alipay (owned by Alibaba, Taobao’s parent company) and Tenpay (owned by Tencent, who also owns a C2C shopping site Paipai.com). Baidu’s online payment site’s success will likely also depend on the success of it’s soon-to-be-launched C2C e-commerce website.