Taobao.com Online Market Flourishes in China

I've lived in China for the past 9 years and as far as I can tell everyone uses Taobao so I'd think the Taobao business is doing pretty well. Some more points as to why it's popular:

1. IM between the buyer and seller is built in. There is usually discussion and negotiation over IM before a sale.

2. Funds are held in escrow until the buyer confirms receipt. It uses Alipay - from the parent company Alibaba.

This article sounds like the hypey eBay articles which always focused on the people making a lot of money and not on the people making below the minimum wage after postage, eBay fees, and time were taken into account. The second group was always the majority.

The difference between eBay and Taobao is that sellers on eBay did not really have to compete with unemployed Chinese people on price.

Article says that listing is free and no comission is taken on transactions. Without these I'm very curious how Taobao generates 200mm/year. It says revenues are from adverts but what is the trick?

what the article doesn't mention is that eBay tried giving away the farm for free in China, and they still got clobbered

Interestingly enough, I tried to visit the site and Chrome flagged it as malware.