It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall.
They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones.
T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall.
So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with racking up their fees, putting arbitrary limits on their accounts, and blatant "first dose free" offers to switch to T-mall.
In the end, only few did, and one who did really did not manage to get full advantage of the platform.
Most "upscale" brand suppliers valued control given by having their Taobao store too much to switch to being banal wholesalers.
Lately, they reversed their stance on Taobao brand stores. But yeah, they definitely shot themselves in the foot with that move.
Then what Amazon is doing here is reverse of what Alibaba/Tmall/Taobao tried. Amazon is pushing smaller brands(<$10M) from being a wholesaler to become a 3rd party seller. but Alibaba tried to push brands from being a 3p seller to a wholesaler. This may be because Taobao wasn't charging 3rd party sellers as much as Amazon, because Taobao was in direct competition with ebay. Also I guess Taobao doesn't have something similar to Fullfillment_by_Amazon, and it does direct shipment from seller to buyer.
It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall.
They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones.
T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall.
So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with racking up their fees, putting arbitrary limits on their accounts, and blatant "first dose free" offers to switch to T-mall.
In the end, only few did, and one who did really did not manage to get full advantage of the platform.
Most "upscale" brand suppliers valued control given by having their Taobao store too much to switch to being banal wholesalers.
Lately, they reversed their stance on Taobao brand stores. But yeah, they definitely shot themselves in the foot with that move.