Taobao was founded on May 10, 2003, with investment from Alibaba Group.

Taobao is the largest online retail business district in Asia, and its goal is to create the world's preferred online retail business district. By combining communities, underworld, and gangs to increase the stickiness of online shoppers, and adopting the latest group shopping model, Taobao's business spans two major parts: C2C (Consumer to Consumer) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer).

In October, the third-party payment tool "Alipay" was launched, using the "guaranteed transaction model" to make consumers trust transactions on Taobao.

The total transaction volume in 2003 was 34 million yuan.

In 2004, "Taobao Wangwang" was launched, linking instant messaging tools with online shopping.

In 2005, Taobao surpassed eBay and began to leave its competitors far behind.

In May, Taobao surpassed Yahoo Japan and became the largest online shopping platform in Asia.

In 2005, the transaction volume exceeded 8 billion yuan, surpassing Wal-Mart.

In 2006, Taobao became the largest shopping website in Asia. In that year, Taobao realized a possibility in China for the first time - the Internet is not just an application tool, it will eventually become a basic element of life. Survey data shows that nearly 9 million people go to Taobao to "go shopping" every day.

In 2007, Taobao was no longer a simple auction website, but the largest online retail business district in Asia. In that year, Taobao's annual transaction volume exceeded 40 billion, becoming China's second largest comprehensive shopping mall.

In 2008, Taobao's new B2C platform Taobao Mall (the predecessor of Tmall) was launched; the Wenchuan earthquake donation platform was launched, raising a total of more than 20 million donations from netizens; in September, Taobao's monthly transaction volume exceeded 10 billion.

In 2009, it had become China's largest comprehensive shopping mall, with an annual transaction volume of 208.3 billion yuan.

On January 1, 2010, Taobao released a new homepage, after which Juhuasuan was launched, and then eTao.com was launched.

On June 16, 2011, Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, was split into three independent companies, namely Taobao, which continued the original C2C business, Taobao Mall (tmall), a platform-based B2C e-commerce service provider, and eTao, a one-stop shopping search engine. In the new structure, the three companies after Taobao's split adopt a mechanism of president and chairman.