Outside a hand full of countries in SE Asia, many have heard of Taobao, but is mystified by it contents and on how to open an account, as Taobao.com is mainly in Simplified Chinese. On the desktop browser version, there is a Google Translate that works quite well, but I’ve found it cumbersome and slow, and subsequent links you click on in Taobao does not carry over the translation and gets shown back in its native language.
So with help from Eugenia Ng as my translator, we have knocked together a quick guide on how to open a Taobao account from an iOS device. So let’s get started:
1. Firstly, you need to download the Taobao app from the AppStore. If you search for “taobao” you’ll find many listings, apart from the main app, the others are mainly companion apps for which you can use to give reviews, compare prices, and track shipments both as a seller or buyer.
2. Once you’ve download the app and open it, you’ll be faced with the app’s home screen. Here you want to tap the icon in the far bottom right corner to access your existing account or, as we are going to do here, create a new account:
3. On the next screen you can enter your existing Taobao account details, or start a new account by pressing the highlighted button:
4. You now need enter your mobile phone details. In first field, select your country from the list that pops up, and then in the second field enter your mobile phone number without any country code. Once you’ve entered both fields, press the orange button to go to the next step:
5. If you have enter your country and mobile phone details correctly, you should receive an SMS text message very shortly afterwards. This SMS will contain a verification code which you will need to enter in the next screen:
6. Once the verification code enter is correct, press the orange button and now you have to enter a desired password for your account. Yes, this is rather strange as nearly every other site which I’ve ever visit at which I need to open an account, I would enter my desired username first, and then the password. The requirements for this password is that it needs to be between 6 to 20 characters in length and can contain both English characters and numbers:
7. Now you can enter your desired username. Remember that there’s millions of Taobao users, so pick one thats unique. Your username needs to be between 2-25 characters in length and can contain both English and Chinese characters and numbers:
8. Once you have entered your username, a pop up message will appear asking you to confirm you selection, pick the left button the confirm, and the right button to go back to edit your username. If your username is taken, the next screen will show a list of suggested other usernames you can use or you can edit your username again.
9. That’s it! The following screen is to confirm that your new Taobao account has been set up. Pressing the orange button will return you to he home screen. During the whole process you’ll get several other SMS text messages, these are used to link your Alipay account for payment. We will look to cover this soon and write up a how to guide for payment of your Taobao purchase soon, trust me, its a very trick process if you live outside of China. And hopefully after that, we’ll also cover have to organize the shipping of your purchases.
Happy Taobao-ing!!!
