Taobao.com, the largest internet retail business in the Asia-Pacific region, opened its "1 Penny sit-in" group purchase platform on Monday after a two-month delay.

However, the launch of the project has led to questions from many Taobao users. ?The representative of Taobao Poly-effective responded to the questions on Tuesday, according to a report from Jinghua Times Wednesday.

On February14 this year, Taobao Poly-effective called on consumers to express their wishes for group purchase projects, and selected nine potential projects.

But eventually, Taobao cut the projects down to three, including the "1888 yuan ($289) for iPhone4 phone", "2000 yuan ($306) for Motorola ME525" and "1 yuan ($ 0.2) for 100 seedlings". When explaining this drastic cut, Taobao argued that the other projects were difficult to implement due to many uncontrollable factors such as earthquakes and product lines becoming obsolete through the introduction of new and better models.

Many customers also complained that the website page for the group purchase disappeared shortly after the purchasing began. They doubted this was a mechanical error. Taobao stated that as there were too many participants in the purchase, the goods were sold out in a very short time. With regard to the disappearance of the page itself, Taobao pleaded ignorance.

As the group purchase has been delayed for over two months, many participants have already lost patience. When many heard of the launch of the project, they found that the appointed website was unable to be opened.

In response to this matter, Taobao said that they had informed participants that the appropriate website for the group purchase would be published through a floating message from Aliwangwang, a free online business communication software. Therefore, participants should have made sure they had logged onto the Aliwangwang website on the day that purchasing began.

As for why Taobao did not inform users by an offline message, Taobao replied that this was due to technical reasons.

Subsequent to the questioning, Taobao Poly-effective made an apology to customers and said they would make a thorough internal investigation.

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