Two weeks ago, we released a post about how to set up your Taobao Shop. If you have followed the guide and managed to set up the shop, the next thing you should do is to drive visitors to your shop by participating in all sorts of promotional activities inside and outside of Taobao’s platform.
However, a freshly set up shop means you cannot advertise on the most commonly used tools such as Taobao/Tmall PPC, Display, Recommendation Engine or participate in Seasonal events Like (Nov. 11th or Ju Huasuan) because there are requirements for the shops, such as DSR (Detailed Seller Rating) no less than 4.4, Trust Score no less than 2.2 etc.
Then, what are other options left for a new beginner like you?
1.Taobao Affiliate (淘宝客)
Taboo Affiliate works on their commission based on CPS (Cost per Sales) model. Due to its publishers’ grassroots background, it doesn’t have much requirement on the advertiser side. Therefore, a new Taobao or Tmall shop with zero DSR or Trust Score is allowed to advertise there.
2. Price comparison sites
There are a large number of price comparison sites, however, most of them only allow shops with DSR higher than 4.6, shop’s rating of 3 to 5 diamonds and product positive reviews ranging from 96% to 98% to promote there.
Fortunately, there are other price comparison sites, like UZhan and huipinzhe.com, that take Taobao shops in as long as they provide their business license and general information needed for participating. Huipinzhe.com doesn’t require anything from Tmall shop.
3.Search Engine Marketing
This only works for companies that are already doing PPC to promote their website on Baidu, as it’s a good opportunity to piggyback on it by adding PPC landing pages with links pointing to their Taobao or Tmall shops. Since Baidu only allows you to promote the company website domain, your Tmall or Taobao shops with web address other than the company website won’t be accepted by Baidu. Therefore, you need to build designated landing page for ecommerce shop, which should have the URL aligned with your company web domain, but on the page products icons redirect links should be created and pointing to the shop. Same method can be applied to other search engines in China.
4. Commercial Union
Commercial Union is a term for an agreement that can be established between shop sellers with similar goods and shop ratings, in order to refer each other to buyers. For a new shop, you may not get much out of this, as only other new shops may share their shop visitors with you.
5. Content marketing on blog and forums
This is not easy work, as it requires a lot of efforts to build a piece of content that can go viral, and in time same drive people to your shop to purchase. This probably takes a book to explain instead in a paragraph. So I won’t explain how to create that kind of content here, but more focus more on where you can place the content.
In the verticals that we are familiar with, like consumer electronics, baby products and furniture, there are forums, community, wiki-based Q&A and media that can be targeted. Please drop us an email for a complete list.