Alibaba is at the forefront of this shift. Its most popular website is Taobao.com, China’s third most visited website and the world’s twelfth. A common saying today in China is wanneng de taobao,6 meaning “you can find everything on Taobao.” Amazon has been called “the Everything Store.” Taobao too sells (almost) everything, everywhere. Just as Google is synonymous with searching online, in China to “tao”7 something is shorthand for searching for a product online.
