Alibaba wants its merchants to ditch their PCs. The ecommerce titan has rolled out new tools into its Taobao mobile app (pictured above) that allow the marketplace’s 8.4 million annual active merchants to run their stores solely from their phones.
The shift to mobile-only is optional for now, it is said that two million merchants have already opted for the smartphone-only method in the two weeks since the new tools have been available in beta. “The growing adoption of smartphones and mobile shopping in China means that online merchants should shift their focus from PC to mobile,” said Zhang Kuo, director of Alibaba Group’s mobile business division, in a statement.
That means an online seller will run their store and add new products to it just from their phone rather than using the desktop browser-based interface. To make that process easier on mobile, merchants can scan a new product’s barcode with their phone to add it to the store’s inventory using the Taobao app. “To complete product dispatch procedures, merchants can simply scan barcodes on shipping bills to enter package tracking numbers, without the need to manually input them,” added a spokesperson. Brand-new Taobao merchants can even start their store from scratch within the Taobao app without the need to fire up a laptop.
Across Taobao and sister site Tmall (a marketplace aimed at larger merchants and major brands), Alibaba has 334 million shoppers. Of the total RMB 787 billion (US$126.4 billion) in consumer spending (GMV) on the two estores in Q4 2014, 42 percent of that tally was spent by people shopping on mobile devices.
That shows China’s shoppers are way ahead of Alibaba’s merchants in the shift to mobile.
阿里巴巴集团希望商家更加移动化而弃用电脑端。近日淘宝手机客户端上线了新的工具（参见上图），方便其每年840万的活跃商家可以完全使用手机管理交易。
目前向移动端的转变还只是可选的，但是据称新的工具BETA版本上线两周内已经有200万商家采用移动模式。阿里巴巴商业部总监说：“智能手机的普遍使用以及中国手机购物的增长意味着网上商家必然需要做出从桌面到移动端的转变。”
这意味着一个线上商家只要通过手机界面就可以管理店铺和添加新产品，再也不需要依赖桌面版浏览器界面了。比如通过淘宝APP，商家可以扫描产品的条形码，然后直接将它添加到商品库存中。“在产品运输过程中，商家可以通过扫描快递单上的条码，免除了手动输入运单号的麻烦。” 新开店的淘宝卖家甚至可以在移动客户端上完成必要的工作，无需打开笔记本电脑。
淘宝及其姐妹店天猫（针对大型商户及品牌）拥有3.34亿的消费者。其中2014年第四季度两家总计营业额780亿人民币，42%都来自移动端。
这意味着消费者已先于商户大踏步迈向移动端了。
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