E-Commerce Site 360Buy Blocks Alibaba’s Product Search Engine

China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site, 360Buy – also known as JingDong Mall – appears to have blocked Alibaba’s product search-engine Etao.com from indexing its site. Looking at the ‘robots.txt’ file for 360Buy, it now says “User-agent: EtaoSpider Disallow: /” (pictured above) in a move that signals heightened rivalry between the two companies. Indeed, 360Buy is second in the B2C sector to Alibaba’s own Tmall.com.

There are still products from 360Buy listed on the Etao product search results at the moment.

Alibaba created Etao.com as an agnostic search engine that, they say, fairly indexes all e-commerce sites. CEO Jack Ma referenced his search product obliquely in a recent speech, where he said that this would give Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) “sleepless nights.” Etao, unlike Baidu, doesn’t (yet?) accept adverts.

Note that Alibaba already blocks Baidu from indexing individual C2C or B2C product pages on both Taobao and Tmall, and has done so for some time.

The two companies have been over-lapping more and more this year. First, Tmall decided to open its platform to fellow e-commerce sites, which gave smaller ventures a greater chance to challenge 360Buy (note that 360Buy is not one of those on-board); and more recently we heard rumors that 360Buy will open a fashion e-tailing site, which would encroach on the purview of Tmall’s many clothing vendors.

With this move, 360Buy seems to be trying to diminish Alibaba’s search engine by taking the B2C sector’s number two site out of its reach.

[Source: TechWeb – article in Chinese; via iChinaStock – in English]