In a statement, group chairman Jack Ma said consolidating the platforms’ operations will better attract sellers and provide consumers with more options, further advancing the Alibaba name brand.

The move comes after Alibaba posted stellar second-quarter earnings, which includes a 159 percent rise in net profit.

Five-year-old Taobao claims that RMB 300 million (US$43.8) is traded on its site daily and from 80 million registered accounts, up from 72 million in June. Meanwhile, Alimama, which launched, claims 3 billion total page views and works with 400,000 small- and medium-sized websites. However, media buyers have argued that Alimama has yet to have a significant impact on the Chinese ad networks operated by Google and Baidu.

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Online travel is another remarkable example with successful e-commerce players. Ctrip s the leading the online travel market with a 51.65 percent market share. Elong, Expadia’s exclusive affiliate in Asia and Mangocity (owned by China Travel Online) lag far behind with a 12.48 and 11.10 percent market share.

The China National Tourism Administration numbers the total revenue of the Chinese travel industry 1,090 billion RMB (155.7 billion USD) for the year 2007. Online Travel booking currently has a share of RMB 2.25 billion (0.32 USD).

Market shares of Chinese online travel companies

Read the complete article and an interview with a Ctrip business development manager here.

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And more about Taobao because it’s so impressive. Take a look at their market share in the C2C industry:

Just five years ago, Taobao didn’t hold quite such an overwhelming lead. Eachnet, founded in 1999, was China’s number one auction site with a peak marketshare of more than 90 percent. The site’s popularity attracted eBay’s interest, and eBay bought the company in 2003. But the process of integrating Eachnet into the global eBay platform was characterized by enormous difficulties and took over a year, giving Alibaba the perfect window of opportunity to enter the consumer-to-consumer market with Taobao. In 2004, Taobao already occupied more than 50 percent of China’s consumer-to-consumer market, while eBay stood at about 35 percent. EBay Eachnet invested heavily to strengthen its presence in China but continued to lose market share to Taobao. And in 2006 eBay sold 51 percent of Eachnet to Tom Online, a wireless internet company with services in China.

The complete the picture, take a look at the B2C industry. The market is (luckily) more fragmented but there are great success examples nevertheless:

Read the rest of an great article about e-commerce in China here.

“No longer will 80% of China’s website traffic go unmonetized”, said Jin Jianhang, an Alibaba Group spokesperson. “The launch of Alimama makes web publishing commercially viable for China’s more than one million small- and medium-sized web sites. At the same time, advertisers now have an affordable way to reach targeted audience groups on the growing number of specialized websites and blogs in China.”

Publishers and webmaster who want to display ads on their websites have to register for an account at Alimama.com. Registration includes a description of the advertising inventory for sale and the respective pricing model for the offered inventory. Pricing models can be page view, CPC or action based.

Advertisers can now review, select and book the available webspaces.

The exchange itself will take an eight percent commission from ad sales. It has reportedly signed 150,000 web publishers and 135,000 personal blogs since its beta release in August.

Some more numbers:

• more than one million registered users
• more than a billion page views a day
• inventory of more than 380,000 websites
• 4,000 new websites an 10,000 new blogs every day