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The sheer scale of the customer base of the mainland's largest online shopping website, Taobao. com, is something of a headache for the company, its president says.
The consumer-oriented online marketplace set up by Alibaba a decade ago has been seeking to take advantage of its system and data resources to meet customers' individual needs and establish a diversified and healthy "online ecosystem".
"But we are facing a predicament, stemming from the very different demands from a huge number of customers," said Taobao president and Alibaba vice-president Zhang Yu.
The e-commerce site now has nearly 500 million registered users and more than 60 million people visit Taobao every day.
Taobao supports searches by users for products ranked by sales volume, retailers' sales history and price, with bigger sellers having a better chance of appearing on the first few pages of search results than smaller or newer retailers.
"Actually, many consumers do want to search stuff by sales volume and believe the best things sells the best," Zhang said. "But others want something different. We must take all of their needs into consideration. This is a test of our understanding about consumers and how to use the data we've got."