Tencent Paipai

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

~ the obit ~

i knew QQ the way everyone online in the 2000s eventually knew QQ, a name, a little green penguin, the messenger a fifth of the planet seemed to be running. what i never touched was the shop Tencent bolted onto all that traffic. Paipai was supposed to be the store the penguin carried to the top of chinese e-commerce, and from where i sat, behind the language wall, it was a thing i read about years later rather than a page i ever loaded.

Paipai launched in September 2005, an auction-style C2C marketplace, Tencent's straight answer to Taobao. the logic looked unbeatable on paper. Tencent already owned the eyeballs, and a good chunk of QQ's hundreds of millions would surely drift into buying and selling. for a while it worked well enough to sit near the top of the global traffic charts. really though, traffic was never the thing that was missing.

the problem was that Taobao had gotten there first and had built the part that actually mattered, the escrow that made buying from a stranger feel safe and the habit that grew around it. free attention off a messenger did not turn into people trusting each other with their money. Paipai stayed the permanent number two, close enough to look alive and never close enough to win. Tencent kept it running the way a big company keeps a hedge running, without much love.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what really happened ~

the end came sideways. in 2014 Tencent took a stake in JD.com and handed Paipai over as part of the deal, the way you pass along a car you never really drove. JD ran it for a bit, then announced in October 2015 that it would close the C2C platform, giving sellers about three months to clear out. the reason it gave was that it could not keep counterfeit goods off the thing. by April 2016 it was gone. i watched none of this happen. i just noticed, later, that one of the biggest names in a market i could not reach had quietly stopped existing.

~ the long tail ~

the counterfeit line is the part that stuck with me, because it was an admission, not an excuse. a marketplace where anyone can list anything fills up with fakes, and policing that at QQ scale was a cost JD did not want on its own balance sheet. JD later dusted the Paipai name off for a second-hand and refurbished storefront, which struggled in its own way and never became the household thing the original was chasing. the brand outlived the shop. the shop, for all its free traffic, could not buy the one thing Taobao had spent years earning.

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