Vying for
the lead in China's internet market, Alibaba and Tencent are engaged in
tit-for-tat tussles, with Tencent canceling the operating accounts of Alibaba's
e-commerce platform Taobao before Alibaba blocked Tencent's popular messaging
app WeChat from Taobao. To strengthen its hand, Alibaba has allied itself with
Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
According
to Chinese-language National Business Daily, in order to safeguard the
interests of WeChat users Tencent recently imposed restrictions on commodities
and vendors on Taobao, affecting some 800,000 accounts. In retaliation, Alibaba
cut off digital access to WeChat on Taobao before teaming up with Sina Weibo.
While both
parties have attributed their moves to the need to uphold customers' interests,
the confrontation actually reflects their battle for supremacy, as both own
community websites boasting several hundred millions of subscribers with
substantial business potential.
The linking
of accounts by Alibaba and Weibo represents another major step in their
alliance, initiated by Alibaba investing US$586 million to buy into the latter
three months ago.
The strife
between Alibaba and Tencent also involves to business related to third-party
online payments. Along with the cancellation of large numbers of Taobao
marketing accounts, WeChat has rolled out a third-party online payment function
by cooperating with Tencent's Tenpay, affecting the operations of Alibaba's
Alipay.
The
majority of online start-up vendors, however, have been caught in the
crossfire. A member of the Shanghai Online Vendor Alliance was forced to abort
its WeChat-based marketing plan after paying some 10,000 yuan (US$1,630) for
its employees to take classes in how to use the platform.
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