Taobao

As temperatures plunge in China’s north this week, enterprising people have gone online to monetize blankets of snow covering their neighborhoods. For a price, you can ask someone to write a message in the snow and send you a photo or video of it.  On the e-commerce platform Taobao – owned by Alibaba, which also owns Inkstone – customers can order messages for about 5 yuan (71 cents) for six words. A heart or an image costs extra. Demand for this unusual service has the south to thank.  A Taobao shop owner in the northern province of Heilongjiang said most of the 100 orders she received in the last few days came from people from southern China who had never seen snow.  To beat the competiti

Kim Kardashian West didn’t manage to break the Chinese internet in her first attempt to connect with online consumers in the country. Kardashian West showed up for about an hour from New York during a live stream hosted by marketplace Tmall on Wednesday night to promote her perfume line KKW Fragrance. (Tmall is owned by Alibaba, which also owns Inkstone.) The live stream got about 30,000 views on KKW Fragrance’s channel and 189,000 views on an official channel of Tmall.  By comparison, Kardashian West’s live-streaming partner of the night, a Chinese influencer called Viya, got 12.6 million views, though she was streaming for six hours.  The comparatively lukewarm response to the reality TV

Singles’ Day has become a force of nature in China. It is the single biggest shopping day in the world in terms of sales. Millions of orders are made in a single day. Last year, e-commerce giant Alibaba smashed its all-time Singles’ Day sales record with $25.3 billion in sales. (By comparison, American shoppers spent $5 billion on Black Friday last year.) And the Singles’ Day is predicted to be even bigger this year. Inkstone is owned by Alibaba. But this Black Friday on steroids was not always about money. It actually started as an anti-Valentine’s holiday, created in 1993 for people to celebrate singlehood. In 2009, Alibaba turned Singles’ Day into a shopping festival. Now other e-commerce