Jack Ma is quoted in the case as saying, we don't have a revenue model. Can you talk a little bit about what they attempted to do and what the reaction was by the customer base? So it's a classic auction, but you don't own Taobao anything unless you actually get a benefit as the seller. When they introduced it, as always on the internet, once you buy price is zero, it was enormous backlash. But 40% of the market or so, they actually liked that kind of a model.
In an era driven by network effects, smaller players struggle to compete against bigger platforms. The trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival, says Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, is choosing a strategy that can’t easily be imitated. A good example is TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China, back in 2007.