Months of bickering have brought an end to a formerly fruitful partnership between local e-commerce site ezbuy and Chinese online shopping behemoth Taobao. Friendship over!
According to ezbuy, they’ve ended their buy-for-me services with Taobao, the marketplace operated by Alibaba Group that’s enjoyed extreme popularity among Singaporeans for its very affordable range of products. A much cheaper alternative to Amazon, really.
Though the buy-for-me services have been popular among local Taobao devotees who want a hassle-free shopping and shipping experience (it’s tough to navigate the site if you can’t read Chinese), it seems like those days are gone now. Ezbuy confirmed to The Straits Times that they’ve ended their services with Taobao after finding it difficult to deliver the Taobao orders placed by customers here for over a month.
The simmering conflict between the two e-commerce sites may have been going on for quite some time, but it came to an apex on Singles Day, Nov 11. The official national festival in China that’s the largest offline and online shopping day in the world was when ezbuy struggled to handle the mounting orders from Singapore. Over 1,500 of ezbuy’s purchasing accounts used to place orders on Taobao were suspended.
It resulted in a huge backlog of orders — an estimated 30,000 — that has since been cleared now, according to an ezbuy advisory recently sent to disgruntled customers.
Last week, ezbuy accused the Alibaba group of bullying them, which prompted a response by the Chinese company, who accused ezbuy of “scalping” their products. The buy-for-me services involve ezbuy creating accounts to buy items from Taobao and reselling them to ezbuy customers at a profit — an act that Alibaba notes hurts buyers, as customers won’t be able to buy goods at preferential prices.
Nonetheless, the local site will continue running their buy-for-me services from other countries including Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Services will also be carried out for orders made from China, but only for Chinese e-commerce sites other than Taobao.
With ezbuy getting hit by this massive setback, now would be primetime (get it?) for Amazon to step in to provide hassle-free online shopping experiences in Singapore.
