Why leading VC firm JAFCO is not giving up on Japan

Everyone knows that the investment market in Japan is considerably smaller than its American cousin. The US saw US$33.1 billion worth of investments for 2013 – Japan, only US$1.5 billion. In these parts, the announcement of a US$50 million fund set up over several years is big news.

Japanese private equity firm JAFCO, on the other hand, has burned through an average of nearly US$80 million in Japanese investments every year since 2008. Last year saw 41 percent of those funds go to startups specializing in IT services. In a time when a stream of venture funds can be seen leaving Japan and even flagship institutions like Mitsubishi want to set up new funds in America, JAFCO’s dedication to Japan is surprising.

Keisuke Miyoshi, corporate officer of JAFCO’s investment division, sees it differently. “JAFCO was founded in Japan. This is where we have our best competitive advantage,” he says. “We do not believe that Japan is just going to sink and disappear. It is a large market that can create new companies and new IPOs.”

JAFCO’s investment activities span the world but are managed at a regional level. In that sense, it could be said that the firm can afford to be bullish on Japan precisely because they are diversified elsewhere.

However, even optimism has its limits. Miyoshi prefers businesses than can transfer their model outside of Japan. When pressed to answer if the country’s shrinking population or productivity concerns have influenced his thinking, Miyoshi maintains that the fundamentals of Japan’s economy are strong.

See: KDDI launches new $50M fund

That said, he does acknowledge that if there was a gap between what the country can produce and what it should be producing, JAFCO would be very interested in a company working to bridge that gap.

“We look for companies that can grow by identifying the opportunities that gaps create,” he said. He was recently impressed by news-curation app Gunosy, and had JAFCO participate in the latest US$12 million investment round.

For Miyoshi, Gunosy solves the gap of what users want to read and what traditional media outlets provide them. A curation app that customizes the user experience solves that dilemma in an elegant way. Gunosy also passes the “global” test. News aggregations apps like Flipboard have been tearing up Google Play and iOS App Store rankings around the world.

Miyoshi might have a sunnier outlook on Japan than other business leaders like Masayoshi Son, but he is no less passionate about finding innovative companies. “Old industries have established players and rules. They repeat the same things over and over. And that is why there is an opportunity for a game changer [in Japan].”

9月3日と4日にスタートアップアジア＠東京を開催します！割引コード を使ってみて下さい！Startup Asia Tokyo 2014 is on Sep 3 and 4. Unlock secret level using code

Globe image via Flickr user mars discovery district

Why leading VC firm JAFCO is not giving up on Japan

Indonesia’s new president seeks crowdsourced help in picking new ministers

President elect Joko Widodo

The election is over in Indonesia, and Joko Widodo has now become the country’s president elect. As one of his first acts as the new president, he needs to find and appoint new cabinet ministers for the coming term. Embracing democracy, Widodo is gathering feedback from the citizens about their choice of ministers.

Two websites are taking on the initiative by conducting online polls regarding Widodo’s new cabinet: Jokowi Center and Kabinet Rakyat. Both websites are created by volunteers, and both claim that they have consulted with numerous people from different circles like journalists, activists, politicians, and students to come up with potential minister names. Indonesians so far have welcomed both initiatives with open arms.

Jokowi Center’s online poll launched first, and the website went down after receiving 18,000 users on its first day. The team had to momentarily redirect users to a Google Docs page, but the site is now back up for all to see. Yesterday the website’s Facebook page announced that it has taken over 85,000 data entries.

Kabinet Rakyat’s online poll

Kabinet Rakyat’s online poll looks better than Jokowi Center’s. While the latter discloses only the names on the poll, the former also puts in the short bio and past achievements of the ministry candidates it lists out on the site.

See: 5 things you need to know about Indonesia’s election tech fighters

Kabinet Rakyat got hacked and went down for a couple days, but it is now back up. Adian Napitupulu, a fellow politician from Widodo’s party and one of the guys behind Kabinet Rakyat told Gatra two days ago that the site receives about 1,700 visitors every hour. The site recorded 43,000 visitors up until July 30th, 12,000 of them also voted in the poll.

This is a very transparent way whereby people from across the nation can cast their vote and make sure that at the very least, Widodo won’t elect someone with a murky past. Indonesia Corruption Watch, for example, is highlighting the track records of all the names listed on Jokowi Center. They will list out the pros and cons of each candidate, and will release the report this month.

Widodo told Jakarta Globe last week that he is indeed asking for input for his upcoming cabinet ministers. He adds, “[The suggestions] will be processed by a team, using a set of criteria. Then, [the results] will be sent to coalition members, before being sent back to the [Jokowi Center] team. The final decision will be on me.” Kabinet Rakyat – with Napitupulu’s connection with Widodo’s party – will make sure that Widodo considers its online poll results as well.

Indonesia’s political scene is taking on the internet wholeheartedly these days. The General Elections Commissions recently opened its vote tally documents to the public, prompting numerous initiatives to count the vote together, and afterwards the Constitutional Court also disclosed president candidate Prabowo Subianto’s appeal documents regarding the official election result.

(Photo from Jokowi Center’s Facebook page)

Indonesia’s new president seeks crowdsourced help in picking new ministers

What most people don’t tell you about how your startup can benefit from social media

Marcus Ho is a social media strategist to best-in-class businesses in Asia. He has helped over 200 corporations ranging from MNCs to fast-emerging startups to increase sales through social and digital campaigns. He’s also the author of Social Payoff.

As a startup, chances are the best way to reach out to your target market will be through online marketing. And while email marketing and direct response marketing may be effective, it is also wise for your startup to take a look at social media as a viable marketing platform too (if you haven’t already done so.)

Now, we all know how pervasive social media is among any group of consumers, but many fail to see the potential in social media marketing. Some firms perceive that social media ROI, such as likes, shares, and comments, are not actually beneficial to a company.

Are you thinking along those lines? If you are, here are three reasons why social media marketing can work for your startup:

1. Listen to your audience

Social media marketing offers one unique aspect of research that any other form of marketing research cannot achieve: access to wide-range market feedback at an extremely low cost. Social media listening tools come at only a fraction of the cost you will incur for traditional research.

Another reason social media listening is the way to go is the ability to measure how your audience is feeling about your product or service and its industry. Here’s a portion of a social media listening report:

This part of the report shows the tally of an online conversation (in this case, blood donation), and also includes the overall sentiment of the conversations. Social media enables marketers to not only measure conversations but also measure the sentiment behind the conversations. That is a very important asset for marketers and can make or break a potential social media campaign depending on its tone and execution.

And that’s not even your best reason for using this channel. Social media listening tools are not just cost-effective, they’re also more specific. So many people are on social media now and one cannot even begin to fathom how much data exists on the internet. Social media listening can give you access to a wider range of factors from which you can gather info, as well as the ability to better customize your demographical research.

So here’s a recap of what social media listening can offer: a much wider sample size and more customizing options, for a lower cost.

See: 7 awesome QR code marketing campaigns

2. Build your own community of passionate fans

Here’s the inevitable truth: the cost of running a startup has been rising steadily over the past few years, and advertising is getting more and more expensive in order to secure leads and a profitable sales margin. The solution for any startup owner, right now, is to reduce your marketing and advertising cost while increasing its effectiveness.

Using social media is your answer.

How so? Let’s take this one step at a time. Everyone is on social media. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, allow us to say this: in this day and age, your best option to reach a wide and relevant audience is through social media.

And with a targeted social media campaign, backed by a powerful social media listening tool, you can steadily increase and fill your fan base with relevant fans with a high potential for conversion.

With a large fan base you can achieve two things: your advertising will become more effective, thus allowing you to reduce your ad spend, and once you’ve cultivated your fans into passionate advocates of your startup, you can continue to sell to them, or even depend on their contacts to bring in even more fans.

It’s a vicious(ly profitable) cycle.

There are many ways for you to increase your fan base online, which we will also be talking about in subsequent articles. But no matter what you do in order to grow your online fan community, it is very important to ensure that your activities revolve around your brand values.

There’s no point in giving away iPads as free gifts when your startup’s product has nothing to do with tech or you don’t even have an iPad-optimized app or website.

3. Generate leads

The ability to listen to and monitor your target audience naturally allows you to take control of conversations and, ultimately, generate leads.

So how do you take control of online conversations? Build relationships with your audience. Educate and provide solutions to the problems they are facing. Through time, you will establish authority within your community, and your status as an industry expert will increase.

A good example comes from Xiaomi’s success in China. It first launched a phone in 2011, and now the startup phone-maker is selling more phones in China than Apple. Xiaomi uses a brilliant strategy to cultivate and ultimately turn fans into customers – and into loyal advocates.

Before the phones even launched, Xiaomi created a forum for its MIUI OS (which is built on Android), and turned their pioneer users into what they term “Mi fans.”

These users, who participated in trying the operating systems on various Android phones and giving feedback, often posted on the forums. The number of users started to grow in the forum as more people participated in discussions.

Soon, the forum grew to a point where they had several major sections that discussed various topics, such as the download center, rookies using the system, and the Xiaomi College. Xiaomi fans started to gather in an offline capacity too, meeting at gatherings every two weeks or so. These cover over 30 cities in China, where users get the opportunity to speak to and interact with Xiaomi engineers. A number of “Mi fans” even get invited to product launches.

There is a pervasive culture of creating a common identity within Xiaomi’s social media strategy. A lot of effort is being put into ensuring that users gain this value-added experience from being a fan, and that matters a lot when you’re trying to get them to purchase your products – particularly when most sales are done online. In one case, Xiaomi sold over 200,000 smartphones in under three minutes during China’s Cyber Monday equivalent sales event last year.

It is important to note that social media can increase your fan base with qualified leads and potential customers, but it is more important to note that social media can be directly responsible for generating leads and sales.

And isn’t that the ultimate aim for any startup business?

See: Startup basics: the sales learning curve

What most people don’t tell you about how your startup can benefit from social media

Quartz Daily Brief—Europe edition—US jobs, Gaza ceasefire, CIA hacked Senate, risqué peaches

What to watch for today

A strong US jobs report. Economists expect the US Bureau of Labor statistics to report 225,000 new jobs in July, which would make it the sixth consecutive month of gains above 200,000.

Will the Gaza ceasefire hold? The US and UN say Hamas and Israel have agreed to an unconditional 72-hour ceasefire starting Friday morning. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called up 16,000 more reservists and has vowed to get rid of Hamas’s tunnels, no matter what.

A decision on smartphone chip patents. The International Trade Commission is due to rule on Tela Innovations’s complaint against HTC, Nokia, and LG. Tela also tried to take Google to court recently.

The clock starts ticking for Edward Snowden. The one-year visa Russia granted to the US intelligence whistleblower expired at 4am GMT. He has applied for permanent asylum, and will reportedly receive a decision within 30 days (link in Russian).

While you were sleeping

China’s manufacturing sector saw solid growth… The government’s official purchasing managers’ index and the medium and small business survey conducted by HSBC/Markit both rose to 51.7 in July, which suggests the government’s stimulus measures are working.

…And Japan’s didn’t. The country’s HSBC/Markit PMI for July fell to an adjusted 50.5, down from 51.5 in June, signaling slower growth in factory activity.

Glencore picked up $7 billion in a mine sale. China’s MMG and its partners completed their purchase of Las Bambas, one of the world’s largest copper mines. Glencore needed to sell its mine for China to approve its takeover of Xstrata.

The CIA hacked the US Senate. Officers infiltrated a computer network used by legislators who were investigating the agency’s controversial detention and interrogation program, according to an internal CIA investigation.

A global trade pact was scuttled. Talks on a global customs standard, which would have added a projected 21 million jobs and $1 trillion to the world economy, collapsed after India vetoed the deal. It wanted more leeway to stockpile and subsidize food for its poor than the WTO was willing to give.

A series of gas explosions rocked Taiwan. Blasts caused by ruptured gas pipelines killed at least 22 people and injured over 200 in the southern city of Kaohsiung. Smoke with a “gas-like smell” was seen coming out of street drains before the explosions.

Another bidder appeared for T-Mobile. French telecommunications firm Iliad offered $15 billion in cash for 56.6% of the US mobile provider, countering an offer from Sprint and its Japanese parent SoftBank. Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s owner, has reportedly already said no.

Quartz obsession interlude

Tim Fernholz on uncovering who’s to blame for Argentina’s debt default. “There are good cases to blame each party: If the vulture funds had exchanged their bonds earlier, they would have made a decent profit and saved us all this mess—but there’s no law saying they had to do that. If global finance hadn’t integrated the world’s economies, Argentina wouldn’t have suffered from capital flight—but it wouldn’t have had access to capital to begin with absent that system. If Judge Griesa hadn’t issued his controversial order…” Read more here.

Matters of debate

Global unrest is at a all-time high. Radicals, terrorists, and freedom fighters are all better-equipped than they used to be.

Don’t be fooled by falling unemployment rates. They disguise an increase in poorly paid part-time workers.

Private schools undermine India’s caste system. Low-caste students would be more respected than in the public school system.

US universities are selling themselves cheap. They’re taking money from donors and big corporations with too many strings attached.

Kids’ clothes shouldn’t be gender specific. So what if girls have their own science-themed t-shirts?

Surprising discoveries

FedEx can deliver hot coffee. Sent to a customer’s desk, just to prove it can.

Peaches are being sold as sexy butts in China. Just see for yourself (SFW).

Big Brother is watching London’s rowdiest drinkers. They’ll be forced to wear alcohol-monitoring anklets (paywall).

There’s a campaign to rename the kaffir lime. The k-word is racist in South Africa.

A little poison is good for you. It spurs our bodies to create antioxidants.

Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, non-racist limes, and naughty peaches to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.

Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief here, tailored for morning delivery in Asia, Europe & Africa, and the Americas.

Quartz Daily Brief—Europe edition—US jobs, Gaza ceasefire, CIA hacked Senate, risqué peaches

The future of online Asian travel isn’t up in the air; it’s buses, taxis, ferries, and trains

Travel involves more than flights and hotels. It’s about the journey from the airport to your lodging. It’s about making the ride as smooth as possible: knowing which cabs to book, where and when to book them, and how much to pay. That’s why hotels double as concierges. Transportation in cities is complex.

And transportation isn’t getting simpler. Cabbing involves a series of complex decisions. You decide where you’re going, the best route to take, and how long it takes to get there without being late. Supply and demand mismatches can mess you up. Cabs may not be around when you need them to be.

The situation gets hairier if you’re a hapless foreigner: now you have to deal with language barriers, new environments, and unfamiliar, often unfriendly, taxi operators. This friction erases the joy out of travel. Railway and subway in Taipei, for instance, run on separate ticketing systems. Auto-rickshaws, or tuk-tuks as they’re called, need you to know obscure locations in the city and pronounce them correctly. Showing drivers the map doesn’t work; some can’t read, and some can’t afford prescription glasses.

Fixing these problems is hard, but the solution is easy to articulate. It’s called networked travel, where old-fashioned motor-and-wheels pair up with computing, mobile, cloud, and software technologies. The goal: to make travel as seamless as possible through the use of both individual and operator data.

Unfortunately, folks think of networked travel too narrowly. Within the online travel industry, everyone wants to crack hotel and flight bookings, turning that segment into a highly competitive field inhabited by naive entrepreneurs and carcasses of broken dreams.

But internet companies are wising up. They are realizing that travelers don’t just care about the lowest prices and best deals, but about making the entire process of getting from home to hotel room painless. Part of the answer lies in ground transport.

Budget air travel is a luxury

It’s more than just catering to cosmopolitan travelers after they touch down. Another huge opportunity is ripe for the taking. While budget air travel has taken off in the past decade, it’s still expensive. A trip to a nearby holiday destination and back will set a person back about US$300, not including hotel stay. The cost to ride on a tuk-tuk, by contrast, is loose change.

By fixating on flights, internet companies missed out on a huge segment of travelers: the intra-country tourists in land-wealthy China and India, the intrepid Malaysian braving the traffic jam between Johor and Singapore for work each weekend, and the unhurried urban dweller seeking a cheap getaway. Entrepreneurs can make money not just from these travelers, but also the bus, taxi, ferry, and train operators that move people by the truckloads. Non-flight travel has a lower barrier to entry for consumers, which is why they do it day after day.

So, unless true airline innovation happens, non-flight travel can make even further inroads into consumers’ lives. Telepresence technology could lessen the need for business trips, while driverless vehicles can make ground travel pleasurable and productive. Think of how cruise ships became popular despite sea travel fading with affordable flight. Similarly, as robots take over the wheel, manufacturers could put a higher premium on in-car entertainment. Apple and Google know this is the future, which is why they’re focusing on customizing iOS and Android for cars.

The money is pouring in. A PhocusWright report observes that in Asia, online travel companies focused on ground transportation have collectively raised US$605 million between 2005 to 2013 – the highest of all travel categories. The investments could accelerate in 2014. Witness Uber’s US$1.2 billion fundraise in June. With its recent expansion, the company’s Asian operations seems likely to receive a sizable chunk of that investment. Also, local players are taking the fight to Uber and raising money of their own. GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia, TaxiForSure and Olacabs in India, as well as Didi Dache in China come to mind. And where opportunity beckons, you can guarantee Rocket Internet is there – its EasyTaxi is available in many major Asian cities.

See more: 10 taxi apps you can use across Asia

Now, here’s an important segway: transporting people shares similarities with transporting goods. Networked travel can fix the problems faced by both. Mobile technology, big data, and GPS can help drivers find optimal routes despite ever-changing traffic. Software can improve fleet management, while algorithms could balance supply and demand. Robots are probably 10 years away from taking drivers out of the equation. The implication is this: once a consumer-oriented ground travel startup scales up, it could remodel itself to do logistics and delivery.

It’s starting to happen. Uber is thinking about it, but startups like Easyvan and Gogovan have already hit the ground running in Hong Kong. But we may not need to wait long for Uber to saunter into logistics. With its resources, it doesn’t need to be the first-mover and can afford to wait, observe, and absorb the lessons made by smaller competitors.

Uniting thousands of little tribes

The massive shift towards ground travel is caused by necessity as the online air and lodging bookings industry have become overcrowded, PhocusWright analyst Chetan Kapoor tells Tech in Asia. He adds that the “largely unorganized nature of the taxi, ferries, and bus transportation modes across Asia makes it ripe for intermediaries to enter, innovate and apply technologies to benefit customers.”

Nowhere is the chaos more serious than in India. While Singapore has a small and tightly regulated taxi industry run by a handful of players, TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G says that Bangalore, the tech capital of India, has about 3,000 cab companies, while Delhi has 4,000. Most are tiny firms with a few dozen taxis running in limited areas.

This situation is highly unfavorable for consumers and operators alike. Locals and especially foreigners are overwhelmed by the choices and they have a hard time figuring out which companies are trustworthy. Meanwhile, smaller cab firms are failing to gain traction since Indian consumers call for cabs rather than hail them on the streets. Yet, even though taxis are still considered expensive to many Indians in the cities who prefer riding tuk-tuks or their own scooters, the demand still outstrips supply. Taxi call centers become a bottleneck as they struggle to keep up.

The massive inefficiency proved perfect for an internet company like TaxiForSure. With its expertise in web and mobile apps as well as digital marketing, the company has became a channel to drive customers to cab companies. It gives consumers one platform to engage different operators, reducing clogging on the call centers. It uses a demand prediction algorithm to create heat maps which drivers can access.

By uniting all these little kingdoms with a layer of technology, TaxiForSure uplifts the entire industry. Unlike Singapore, where taxi companies are wary of GrabTaxi for pocketing booking fees that would have gone to them, Raghu claims that cab firms in India are happy to work with TaxiForSure.

See: Why GrabTaxi is giving Singapore’s largest taxi operator a run for its money

“A wife of a taxi driver we’re working with wanted to meet us. We didn’t understand why. But when she did, she started crying and thanked us. She told us that her husband used to work for someone else, and the little money he got was used to get drunk. He would beat the wife and kids, and he would have no savings,” he tells Tech in Asia.

“But after working with TaxiForSure, we were giving him so much business that he would spend 10 hours outside. He’d be tired by the end of the day. So instead of going to the liquor store, he goes home, eats and sleeps, and cleans the car the next morning. The kids join in. He earned more money and spent on a television and refrigerator. The kids started going to school. We didn’t know we were making that kind of impact.”

Raghu has seen cab drivers who were earning less than IDR40,000 (US$819) a month start making more than IDR50,000 (US$1,023) after working with TaxiForSure. Meanwhile, cab operators who earned IDR50,000 a month have tripled or quadrupled their revenues.

All shapes and sizes

Taxi apps are hogging the limelight, but they aren’t the only play. Another Bangalore company RedBus has left its mark in the tech world in Asia with ticketing reservation software for bus operators that syncs with a website for people to find and book bus tickets. While the company was sold and went through internal turmoil, its business model has been replicated across Asia.

In Singapore, companies like BusOnlineTicket and Easibook are using software to replace pen-and-paper records for bus operators plying the Singapore and Malaysia route. The Philippines has PinoyTravel, which signed deals with the two largest bus companies in the country. VeXeRe is doing something similar in Vietnam, where instead of calling to book a bus, Vietnamese can now do the same thing online. While Asia’s geographical and cultural diversity serves as barriers to startups, it could also help by making cheap, cross-border getaways by bus or ferry enticing. For example, Batam island in Indonesia is a short boat ride from Singapore.

Kapoor believes Asia is at an early stage where traditional transportation services are just starting to come online. Startups in this space are tackling local opportunities rather than going regional. He has some thoughts about what the next step might look like:

“We can expect some companies to offer a full-suite of transportation services under one platform. Australia-based Rome2rio is an interesting multi-modal metasearch startup doing something on those lines by aggregating feeds from multiple providers.”

Rome2rio sees itself as a Google for transport data. It wants to organize the world’s transportation information to give users a full itinerary combining various forms of travel. It eases the traveler’s dilemma of choosing alternate transport modes and routes by displaying all the options side-by-side and including pricing. It integrates open-source data, APIs, and its own manual data entries, and it even supplies its own API for app developers to access search results. It shows what open data exchange can create – a single platform to make travel planning and booking easy.

Working on a slightly different approach is 12go.asia, a website launched in 2012 that offers a different sort of data integration. Based in Singapore and Bangkok, 12go runs like RedBus but incorporates ferry tickets too. It’s now selling in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Brunei, and hopes to offer minivan, rail, and flight tickets in the future.

“We’re not really only about selling a bus ticket […] the goal is to create a pan-regional clearinghouse and data standard to allow people to pay for any travel needs from a single source,” says founder and CEO Alexey Abolmasov, who secured US$300,000 in seed funding to kickstart his project.

Eventually, 12go hopes to roll all the trips you need to take from one place to another into one standard ticket – an ambitious undertaking that could save consumers a lot of pain. It even hopes to integrate with cab booking services like EasyTaxi.

All these signs point to one thing: We’re not too far from a revolution in how people move within and across borders, as many of the pieces are already in place. As these online services grow in popularity and consolidate, we could reach a state of intelligent travel where all you need to do is key in a travel date and destination, and a whole cohort of cloud services would go to work crafting an optimized itinerary for you. Then, it’s just one click to book all your tickets at one go. The journey itself could be just as seamless: an app notifies you of the flight details. You get a Yo from a cab company, signaling that your ride - sans driver – is waiting at the doorstep to whisk you to your destination.

The future of online Asian travel isn’t up in the air; it’s buses, taxis, ferries, and trains

From sign up to checkout, a complete English guide to shopping on Taobao and Tmall

If you plan on living in China for an extended period of time, using Taobao and Tmall, the country’s two biggest online shopping sites, is well worth the effort. Unfortunately, there’s no English version, so if you can’t read Chinese, then the sites can be a bit daunting – even with Google Translate. That’s why Tech in Asia has decided to make this English-language tutorial on how to use Taobao and Tmall.

Before getting started, you’ll need a Chinese phone number, a credit card (Visa, Mastercard, PCB, or PPS for foreign cards), email address, and a Chinese mailing address. Alternatively, you can go to local post offices to buy Taobao recharge cards, but this article will focus on using credit cards. The screenshots in this guide will all be in Chinese, but we highly recommend you use Google Chrome’s built-in web page translation to make your life a bit easier.

Signing up

Navigate to login.taobao.com and click the button to sign up.

Leave the country as the default mainland China. Input your phone number, and click to unveil a CAPTCHA code. Type it in, make sure to check the terms of service box, and click on to the next step.

Check your email to see something that looks like this. Click the big orange button or the long verification link. This should automatically redirect you back to the next step on Taobao.

Congratulations! You’ve got a Taobao account (but not an Alipay account … more on that further down). Now it’s time to find stuff.

Shopping around

Head back to the main Taobao.com website, and type in whatever you’re looking for. In this example, I want to buy a hard drive for my computer. It’s best to look up the Chinese name for whatever you need (Nciku might be a better option for finding the exact phrase if Google Translate doesn’t work). English search terms might work, but Chinese will get you better results.

Depending on what you’re looking for, you’ll see a variety of different filters to narrow down your search. Below that are the product listings. This is where Chrome’s translation feature, despite the awkward spacing and shoddy translation quality, can come in handy.

Tmall and Taobao items are listed together by default. For my purchase, I don’t want to risk getting a fake, so I’m going to click on the Tmall tab at the top to further narrow my search (we’ll look at pages from both sites, though). Tmall is generally more likely to sell genuine products than Taobao. The payment process is the same for both.

Also keep an eye out for the credit card icon, indicating that the seller accepts credit card payments. Almost all Tmall merchants accept it, but that’s not always the case on Taobao.

Taobao and Tmall product pages differ a bit, so we’ll start with Taobao. You can calculate shipping costs by selecting your home province from a drop down menu just below the price. The right pane contains important seller information, notably the merchant’s feedback rating and chat status.

That rating, which contains one to five icons, is based on the total amount of transactions that received positive feedback. This is probably the most important indicator of the merchant’s reliability and honesty. As a rule of thumb, gold crowns are legitimate shops and are perfectly safe to buy from. Silver crowns can probably be trusted, too. Buy at your own risk from merchants with fewer than four diamonds, and it’s probably best to avoid hearts altogether. Each icon is superior to five of the lesser icon, so one diamond is better than five hearts, one silver crown is better than five diamonds, and so on.

You’ll also see some numbers with arrows pointing up or down, but these can more or less be ignored. They indicate delivery speed, seller attitude, and whether the seller’s items match the descriptions. The arrow indicates if the positive feedback is above or below average.

See: How to make your favorite animated GIFs into custom stickers on WeChat

The chat icon is blue if the merchant is online and available to chat with. If your Chinese is good enough, you can speak directly to the merchant at pretty much any point during the transaction, from asking details about an item before purchasing or even after the items are delivered. Reliable merchants on Taobao are fairly active and easily reachable, and it’s possible to even bargain or get items that aren’t visibly listed.

Depending on the item, you’ll see several boxes where you can specify your preferred details of the item like size, color, bundle options, etc. Make sure to choose something rather than nothing, or else you can expect a phone call from the merchant asking you what you want in Chinese. You’ll see a few other icons next to the item photo. Check the glossary below to see what they all mean:

Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a number of tabs, which is on specifications by default. Take any reviews you read with a grain of salt, as there’s no telling how many paid fake reviews have been written for a particular product. You can also see a history of how many times the item has been sold under the transactions tab.

Below this you might find a few more scattered product details, but this area is mostly used to advertise other items that the merchant is selling.

Tmall product pages are similar, but they lack the seller rating pane. This is because all Tmall vendors are assumed to be legitimate B2C businesses that are pre-vetted by the website. For electronics, you’ll see a blue ribbon at the top left showing that Tmall has certified the product as genuine.

Check it out

Note: If you’re using a VPN, we’d highly recommend you deactivate it for the remaining steps so it won’t wreak havoc on the shopping cart and checkout procedures.

Click the button with a shopping cart icon to add it to your cart, and a window should pop up asking if you wish to check out immediately. If not, there’s a shopping cart link at the very top of the page.

On the shopping cart page, check the boxes next to the items you want to buy. You’ll see both Tmall and Taobao items on this page, but you can only buy from one site at a time. For Taobao items, you can also compare the checked items as part of a recently added feature. Product details, ratings, and merchant stats can all be seen side by side.

Click the orange button on the bottom left to proceed to the checkout page. Next, you’ll be prompted to enter a bunch of personal information before making your first purchase. Most of this will be kept in the system so you won’t have to re-enter it for future transactions.

First, select your phone number from the drop down, and send yourself an SMS code. Enter the code and confirm to move onto the next step.

Input your address details and your phone number again. You can leave the landline field blank and just enter your mobile number.

Click the big button on the bottom right corner to submit your order.

Now it’s time to make an Alipay account that will be linked to your new Taobao/Tmall account. Enter and re-enter the password of your choice. It can be the same as your Taobao/Tmall password. Check the terms of service box, and confirm.

You’ll be shown a list of banks that you can link to your Alipay account. Click on the second tab to reveal credit card options, and scroll down to see the foreign cards. Choose yours, and move on to the next step. Using domestic bank cards is not an option because they require you to enter a Chinese citizen ID card number.

Enter your credit card and card holder details. Be sure to enter your billing address, not your shipping address. Click the orange button at the bottom, and you’re done! Take note that a credit card transaction fee might be applied. In this case, it was about RMB 12 (US$2).

If you don’t see that green checkmark, don’t try reordering just yet. The transaction might have gone through anyway. Make sure to check your credit card activity on your bank’s website first.

Post-purchase

Your items will be shipped soon, and delivery usually only takes one to three days in China. Once it comes, it’s good etiquette to confirm payment. If not, this will be done automatically in 10 business days.

To do this, head back to the main Taobao page and click on the “我的淘宝” (“My Taobao”) link at the top. This is where you can review your purchase history and check the status of items you’ve delivered. A gift box means the seller hasn’t shipped it yet, a delivery truck means it’s on the way, and a checkmark means it’s been delivered. Clicking on the button to the right of an order will let you confirm that an item has been delivered and is in good condition. You can also evaluate the item and seller if you please.

If an item never comes or is in poor condition, refunds are usually available if the item page shows the appropriate icon (see the glossary above).

Note: When the courier delivers the item to your door, it’s best to open it up and check to make sure it’s not broken before you sign for it. If it’s not what you want, simply refuse to take it. Otherwise, getting a refund will be extremely difficult.

To apply for a refund, click on the item in your order history. You’ll be brought to a page full of info about that specific purchase. If the merchant is taking a long time to ship the item, you can give them a nudge using the reminder link. You can use this once per hour.

Next to that link is the refund application. Select the reason for your refund from the dropdown menu and enter a few details in the appropriate field (Chinese is best here). You can also upload a photo of a broken or incorrect item.

From the author’s experience, refunds are hit and miss. If you don’t see a return made in your credit card activity within a week, call your credit card’s bank and ask to refute the transaction.

Happy shopping!

From sign up to checkout, a complete English guide to shopping on Taobao and Tmall

Alibaba makes a big push into gaming with $120 million investment in US-based Kabam

Chinese ecommerce titan Alibaba is making yet another investment in an American company by pouring US$120 million in funding into Kabam, a developer of online and mobile games. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported this, says it also involves a deal for Alibaba to distribute Kabam’s games in China to users of its Taobao marketplace and Laiwang messaging app.

The move signals Alibaba’s intent to challenge WeChat more strongly by incorporating social gaming into Laiwang, which has been struggling to gain traction.

Kabam, which is aiming for US$550 million in revenue this year, will get a boost from new users in China. It will launch 10 games through Alibaba in the next three years. The studio specializes in games themed around medieval myths, like Kingdoms of Camelot and The Hobbit Kingdoms.

See: Here’s our roundup of Alibaba’s investments in US-based companies

Kabam is reportedly seeking to IPO later this year. Alibaba is also on course to list publicly this year, but there has been no movement since the company’s June update to its regulatory filing in which it chose NYSE rather than NASDAQ. Alibaba’s IPO could top Facebook’s in size when it finally hits the stock tickers sometime this fall.

Previous Alibaba investments in the US include Lyft and Shoprunner.

(Source: WSJ)

Alibaba makes a big push into gaming with $120 million investment in US-based Kabam