Stores that earn top ratings for service and quality from customers and high sales volumes are entitled to partial or full refunds.

[10] In February 2014, Alibaba launched Tmall Global as a cross-border marketplace for foreign brands and merchants to sell directly to Chinese consumers.

[13] Tmall.com was registered on October 17, 1997,[14] with Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Tmall currently features more than 70,000 international and Chinese brands from more than 50,000 merchants and serves more than 180 million buyers.

As on Taobao Marketplace, the C2C e-commerce platform under Alibaba Group, buyers and sellers can communicate prior to the purchase through AliWangWang (Chinese: 阿里旺旺; pinyin: ālǐ wàngwàng), its proprietary embedded instant messaging program.

It has become a habit among Chinese online shoppers to “chat” with the sellers or their customer service team through AliWangWang to inquire about products, engage in bargaining, etc.

[citation needed] Unlike online sales on marketplaces like Amazon, the operation of a TMall shop requires a specialized and dedicated cross-functional team.

Such a team can either be employed by the merchant inhouse or, as in most cases, is managed through a certified Tmall Partner[17] Agency ("TP") which operates the store on an ongoing basis on behalf of the shop owner.