[3] Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003[4] by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Taobao Marketplace facilitates consumer-to-consumer retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores that mainly cater to consumers in Chinese-speaking regions (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) and abroad,[5] which is made payable by online accounts.

Auctions make up a small percentage of transactions, whereas the majority of the products are new merchandise sold at fixed prices.

[7]: 55 In October 2010, Taobao beta-launched eTao as an independent search engine for online shopping to provide and merchant information from a number of major consumer e-commerce websites in China.

[7]: 68  Taobao also invites professionals and academics with relevant expertise to public evaluate proposed rule changes in order to inform voters.

[7]: 67  Taobao can implement jury decisions through means including freezing payments, taking money from a sellers' store deposit, lowering user ratings, or removing a party from the platform.

[7]: 67  In some instances, Taobao has used large juries of 800 to 1000 jurors to decide issues relating to platform governance.

[7]: 67  For example, Taobao used a large jury to decide whether to allow a baby bottle manufacturer, Betta, to remain on the platform.

[7]: 67 In 2019, Taobao launched a dispute resolution called Golden Cudgel, named after the monkey king's magical weapon in the 16th century novel Journey to the West.

[23]: 204  This mechanism allows sellers who have passed qualifying exams to remove a limited number of malicious reviews on a daily basis without prior permission from the platform.

[23]: 204  Sellers' ability to use the Golden Cudgel mechanism is revoked if they are found by the platform to have repeatedly removed reviews improperly.

[24] To ensure safe transactions, Alipay uses an escrow system through which payment is only released to the seller once the buyer has received goods in satisfactory condition.

According to the Alibaba Group website, Alipay partners with multiple financial institutions as well as Visa and MasterCard to facilitate payments in China and abroad.

[10] At the time it was implemented, the mandatory escrow feature of Alipay was a major institutional innovation for e-commerce platforms.

[26] Taobao Marketplace allows buyers and sellers to communicate prior to the purchase through its embedded proprietary instant chat program, named AliWangWang (Chinese: 阿里旺旺; pinyin: ĀlǐWàngWàng).

This service was created with the goal of allowing online retailers to market their products utilizing social shopping.

[30] Taobao Live now has over 10,000 weblebrities promoting a wide range of items including as cosmetics, apparel, cuisine, and numerous electrical gadgets.

[31] Alibaba promotes a new style of live streaming, called cūnbō (村播), that features rural sellers.

Taobao has given them their own category in the app, with the purpose of making it easier for these rural sellers to find customers and followers on the platform.

At the 2017 party, Jack Ma launched his film Gong Shou Dao[35] (Defend the Homeland with Kungfu).

[7]: 65 Taobao shares information with police and local courts to assist in locating sellers alleged to be selling counterfeit products.

[7]: 65  For example, in 2014, collaboration with law enforcement resulted in 1,000 counterfeit cases, 400 arrests, and the shutdown of 200 related physical stores, warehouses, and factories.

[7]: 41  The Chinese government mediated the dispute, resulting in Taobao revising its seller fees and providing 1.8 billion RMB in support for small businesses using the platform.

[7]: 41 In August 2017, the company removed controversial vendors offering personalised messages featuring African children over concerns of child exploitation.

However the situation proved more complicated after a photographer contacted by the Beijing Youth Daily said "the children only received snacks or a few dollars as reward", indicating that there was legitimate child exploitation.

[38] In 2019, Taobao removed all items related to the Houston Rockets in response to the organization's general manager Daryl Morey posting a tweet about Hong Kong.

[41][42] In 2022, the Office of the United States Trade Representative named Taobao on its list of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.

[47] With over 1 billion product listings as of 2016,[48] the combined transaction volume of Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com reached 3 trillion yuan in 2017.