Baidu to rival Alibaba

[img_assist|nid=9097|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=59]China’s Baidu company is planning to introduce a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading community. Moreover the company is working on an online payment service, a sort of online Web service that enable their “future” online merchants to offer transactional financing.

The service known as BaiFuBao is planned to be launched the same time the company will release its C2C platform in the near future. Baidu is not providing any details on how this BaiFuBao will be functioned, what is the payment flow, fee structure, the cap on financed amounts, and most important is what actions that Baidu will be taken to mitigate the risks of the China’s online payment fraud.

Baidu is apparently trying to rival Alibaba that owned TaoBao, the leading C2C provider in China, and Alibaba’s payment provider Alipay. But Alibaba is not the only competitor of Baidu. Now additional challenge is coming from eBay China which has a venture partner called Tom, as well as the eBay EachNet platform. The contest strengthened in light of the recent actions taken by TaoBao which blocked Baidu from indexing its product items listed on the site.