Taobao Opens Class to Help Chinese Elderly Better at E-Commerce

Taobao started its senior’s programme named “Taobao College for Seniors” on Monday in Hangzhou, headquarter of the e-commerce giant.

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Introduction of such programme entails Taobao has realized a significant presence of elderly users on its platform, and it intends to improve their user experience through the aforementioned programme.

About 150 elderly students from the city’s Shangcheng district attended the opening class, learning about the Taobao shopping experiences of the elder generation.

Liu Yanping, born in the 1950s, shared her own online shopping experiences and introduced the class on Taobao’s mobile features. As the first elder Taobao experiencer, Liu started shopping on Taobao in 2006 and knows online technology even better than young people.

In addition to giving lectures and organizing researches, Liu’s main job is to help Taobao improve the shopping experience and enhance the product quality from elder customers’ perspective.

The online shopping experiencers helps Taobao better product quality and meet the needs of various customer groups, said Ding Jian, who is charge of Taobao’s information platform and interaction business.

To target the silver-haired customers, Taobao put a new feature online in February, called “family account,” connecting all family members in one account to make payment much easier. 350 million new users have registered for the family account since then.

According to statistics from Taobao, among 300 million elderly customers, three-quarters of those are aged between 50 to 59 and are about to retire. Last year, they spent 5,000 yuan on average in purchasing about 44 items. In addition, the elderly are growing a bigger presence among other roles on Taobao: shop owners, shopping guides, and shopping podcast hostess…

When the e-commerce platform advertised to recruit elderly online shopping experiencers early this year, it received more than 3,000 resumes from interested senior citizens.

“Before retirement, I began to teach internet classes in senior colleges to let the internet benefit all,” said Liu Yanping who once worked as an adjunct professor in the English department of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University.

“I want to continue to be useful in my late years. ”