Type of business Privately held company Headquarters Shanghai, China | Type of site Online shopping Area served China | |
Founded July 2015; 1 year ago (2015-07)
Shanghai, China Founder(s) Charles Erickson
Jay Thornhill
Tyler McNew | ||
Baopals is an online shopping platform based in Shanghai, China, that enables users to shop from Taobao and Tmall in English. The platform serves as a bridge to all products and sellers on Taobao and Tmall, with information updated in real-time and translated to English. Product organization, customer service, payment, and delivery are geared towards non-Chinese users, as the company's mission is to make shopping in China easier for expats. The platform is accessible online as well through the company's official WeChat service account.
Contents
The platform organizes products into departments, subcategories and selects official Tmall stores and products to highlight throughout the website and blog. Baopals currently operates out of the Huangpu District of Shanghai, with a staff of eighteen and an office dog named Doge, who was pictured in an article from China Daily about the benefits of having pets in the workplace.
History
Baopals was founded in Shanghai, China. The founders, expats living in China, aspired to make living in China easier for foreigners. Helping them shop on Taobao and Tmall became the company's first mission, and after seven months of development, the platform opened to beta users in February 2016.
In an interview with China Daily, Charles Erickson said:
The idea was born out of necessity from all of us. I was always asking my Chinese colleagues to help me buy things on Taobao. So, we just wanted to figure out a way to do this independently.
On the company's tech platform, Jay Thornhill said:
[People may] think that we’re hand selecting products from Taobao and Tmall, but our tech actually bridges everything over from Taobao and Tmall automatically, in real time. So all the products and sellers are there.
Recognition
After launching in February 2016, Baopals was featured by local media in Shanghai. That's Shanghai wrote: "Worry no more, because Baopals was tailor-made for you. Is it Taobao translated into English? Well, yes, but you could just as easily do that on your browser. What Baopals does instead is reconfigure the interface, making it sleek and approachable, and compartmentalizing all that miscellanea into 16 categories. Game status: changed."
City Weekend later published a piece on Baopals, saying, "At long, long last: shopping start-up Baopals has cracked the world of Taobao and Tmall wide open for the expat community. Translating the treasure trove of these products into English would have been enough, but the company also offers phenomenally easy delivery and payment options that reflect the gradually opening Chinese market in which us expats participate on a daily basis. Unlike existing concierge services that act more as middlemen, the Baopals team wanted to provide a more independent shopping experience."
In the following months Baopals received national attention in an article from the Global Times in an article about young foreign entrepreneurs in China, and was featured on the front page of Tech Crunch media partner TechNode, who wrote: "While a handful of expat entrepreneurs try to bring innovation from their country to China, this startup builds on the success of one of China’s largest companies and adapts it to expat tastes."