Baidu Youa

» see youa.baidu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Baidu Youa was the search engine's attempt to own Chinese shopping the way it owned Chinese search. It went into beta on 18 October 2008 and opened to everyone on the 28th, a person-to-person marketplace of individual stalls with buyer feedback attached, aimed directly at Taobao, which by then already had most of the country's online retail.

The piece that mattered was payment. Taobao had Alipay holding the money in escrow until the buyer confirmed the parcel had arrived, and that mechanism is most of why Chinese e-commerce worked at all in a market with no consumer trust in strangers. Baidu built its own version, Baifubao, and ran Youa on top of it. Baifubao then spent the entire life of the marketplace without a payment license from the central bank, which is a bad position for the thing holding everyone's money.

Nothing else about it was different enough to matter either. Sellers were already on Taobao with years of accumulated feedback attached to their names, and moving meant leaving that behind for a site offering them nothing bigger in return. On 31 March 2011 Baidu published an adjustment notice: the shopping platform and everything transactional on it would close within a month.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

This is a market I have no standing in. Buying on a Chinese marketplace in 2009 meant a Chinese bank card and a Chinese phone number, so Youa was closed to me at the sign-up screen before anything else about it applied. What is legible from the outside is the pattern, and the pattern is that search companies keep deciding that because they own the query for a product they can own the sale of it, which has almost never worked out anywhere.

Baidu kept the pieces it could still use. Baifubao and Baidu Hi both survived the closure, and the classified-listings half of Youa was folded into a local services play. The retail ambition is the part that got shut.

~ what got buried with it ~

The interesting part is where Baidu sent the sellers. The shutdown notice named two partner malls, Lekutian and Yaodian100, with sweeteners attached: waived deposits of ten thousand yuan and free technical service fees for certified flagship stores.

Lekutian was Baidu's joint venture with Rakuten, launched in January 2010, and it copied Japanese retail conventions onto Chinese shoppers who did not want them. It stopped serving customers at midnight on 27 April 2012 and wound up by the end of May, more than a hundred million yuan down. Yaodian100 went first: by March 2012 the Chinese trade press was reporting it was hunting for a buyer, with its marketing already halted for lack of cash. Baidu had handed its merchants two exits and both of them closed within about a year of the door they came through.

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