Taobao-a decision support system

In this paper we will discuss the success of Taobao (hunting for treasures)-China´s most popular online shopping website, which has gained more than 80% Chinese e-commerce market share and more than 200 million user in mainland China now. Taobao beat Ebay and its Chinese partner-Eachnet in 2006. For Taobao is focus on Chinese main land market, a lot of Western Countries´ researchers are not familiar with it, and most of the research about Taobao are focusing on marketing point of view. In this paper, we will see Taobao´s story from Decision Support System (DSS) point of view. We think Taobao and other ecommerce websites themselves are systems which will support the decision making of their users. In the paper, we will view some unique decision support functions that Taobao can give to their users and discuss the future research that can be done from this paper.