Along with Taobao’s “special offer edition”, there are also “super factory plan” and “10 billion production area plan”, three major initiatives that Alibaba uncovered asd three pillars of Taobao’s C2M strategy.

Taobao Special Offer app is positioned as Alibaba’s C2M e-commerce, offering hundreds of millions of consumers all over the country quality products at the factory direct supply price.

Taobao’s Juhuasuan announced in March 2019 that it would transform 1,000 industries. By December, C2M business division was established to undertake the digital upgrading of traditional industries. In the recent Women’s Day festival, the number of C2M orders grew by 370% YoY.

In the next three years, Taobao will rely on its core digital capabilities and Taobao Special Offer to help 1,000 industrial belt factories upgrade to “super factories” with an output value of over 100 million yuan, creating 10 billion new orders and 10 industry clusters with an output value of over 10 billion yuan nationwide.

This seems to be win-win cooperation among the three parties. In addition to the lower-tier city penetration of the platform itself, the demand of consumers on the pricing and product quality can be met. And, for China’s industrial factories, more efficiency and certainty will be promoted.

The lower-tier cities market is a battlefield that e-commerce giants can’t retreat from. JD launched the first level entrance of Jingxi on WeChat, and Pinduoduo followed with more subsidies. Now, Alibaba has two weapons: Juhuasuan and Taobao Special Offer.

What’s the difference between Taobao and Taobao Special Offer (SO)?

Taobao SO UI is simpler with less (about 15) product categories. It integrates gamification features such as offering virtual coins upon browsing specific pages to completing certain tasks.

Any company or individual can set up a store on Taobao, which will be on Taobao app; but, Taobao SO app only lists selected products. See the quick demo below:

Pinduoduo and Taobao’s manufacturing strategies »