Taobao, an Internet retail website from China that provides a comprehensive product offering and serves over 190 million registered users, has announced that in collaboration with Yahoo! JAPAN, it is going to introduce complementary cooperative e-commerce initiatives aimed at offering more choices to the consumers and also helping small businesses to recover from the recent global financial crisis.

The website is a subsidiary ot Alibaba Group, a company that helps people to buy or sell online anywhere in the world. It runs a number of Internet-based businesses that includes business-to-business international trade, online retail and payment platforms and data-centric cloud computing services.

These initiatives will enable Chinese small businesses on Taobao to offer quality products via e-retail to consumers in Japan, and at the same time, the Japanese merchants on Yahoo! JAPAN Shopping will be now be able to directly address Chinese consumers.

Within the new initiatives, Taobao and Alibaba.com Japan Co., Ltd. will jointly operate TaoJapan, which is a Chinese-language platform offering Japanese products to Taobao users. While Taobao will operate the website, Alibaba.com Japan, a joint venture between Alibaba.com, a business-to-business e-commerce platform and SoftBank Corp. will serve as fulfillment service provider for Yahoo! JAPAN China Mall.

Further, TaoJapan and Yahoo! JAPAN's China Mall, a Japanese-language platform offering Chinese products to Yahoo! JAPAN shoppers will also begin offering 8 million and 50 million product listings respectively as a part of the collaboration. This will help consumers on Taobao and Yahoo! JAPAN to buy and sell using systems and procedures that are already familiar to them. Also, it will enable the merchants to continue listing products and process sales in their native languages while the buyers will be able to leverage the existing e-payment solutions such as Alipay for making the payments.

According to Jack Ma, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, both the companies are pleased to help Japanese small businesses sell their products to China on Alibaba's Taobao platform as it believes more choice is a good thing, and as a result of this initiative, their respective customers will eventually be able to choose from millions of products from China and Japan.

Ma noted that in addition to providing their respective consumers with broader choices, both Alibaba Group and SoftBank also understand the power of e-commerce to change the fortunes of small businesses for the better and that's why they have decided to create a solution that brings about benefits for both the small businesses and the consumers in China and Japan, and around the world.

In March 2010, Taobao.com was permitted to offer online game virtual currency transaction services by making use of Internet, according to an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture.