Taobao and Tmall's 2025 Twelve Initiatives for Merchant Empowerment: A 10 Billion RMB Investment to Support High-Quality Development

Taobao and Tmall's 2025 Twelve Initiatives for Merchant Empowerment: A 10 Billion RMB Investment to Support High-Quality DevelopmentIn 2025, Taobao and Tmall will launch twelve significant initiatives aimed at reducing merchant costs, boosting sales, and comprehensively improving the business environment for merchants. These initiatives focus on optimizing platform rules, strengthening merchant support policies, and deepening the integrity system

Taobao and Tmall's 2025 Twelve Initiatives for Merchant Empowerment: A 10 Billion RMB Investment to Support High-Quality Development

In 2025, Taobao and Tmall will launch twelve significant initiatives aimed at reducing merchant costs, boosting sales, and comprehensively improving the business environment for merchants. These initiatives focus on optimizing platform rules, strengthening merchant support policies, and deepening the integrity system. The ultimate goal is to protect merchant rights, combat opportunistic buyers ("wool party"), and achieve a win-win-win situation for merchants, consumers, and the platform, driving high-quality development of the platform economy.

I. Increased Investment to Support Merchant Growth

Taobao and Tmall will invest over 10 billion RMB (approximately $1.4 billion USD) to directly support merchant business growth. This substantial investment will be channeled through various specific measures to benefit a wide range of merchants and create strong momentum for development.

1. 10 Billion RMB Investment to Boost Merchant Sales Growth

In 2025, Taobao and Tmall will invest over 10 billion RMB to support merchant development. Alibaba Mama will launch a series of support policies including new customer packages, transaction guarantees, continuous active growth incentives, and marketing rebate incentives, benefiting over 3 million merchants. These policies aim to provide comprehensive support to merchants, helping them improve performance and achieve sustainable development.

2. Support for New Merchants: Up to 2.5 Million RMB in Incentives

To help new merchants grow rapidly, Taobao and Tmall have launched the "Blue Star Plan" and "Thousand Star Plan." The "Blue Star Plan" will provide 15 benefits to high-quality new merchants, with a maximum incentive of 2.5 million RMB per merchant. The "Thousand Star Plan" focuses on 14 potential niche sectors, providing merchants in these sectors with exclusive advanced benefits and business incentives. Furthermore, Tmall Global will offer commission rebates to new merchants, helping them integrate faster into the cross-border e-commerce market. These plans will provide strong support for new merchants, lowering the barriers to entry and accelerating their development.

3. Upgraded Traffic Mechanism: High-Quality Products Receive More Traffic

Taobao and Tmall will upgrade their search, recommendation, and traffic mechanisms, optimizing the matching of "people and products" to ensure that high-quality products receive better and more traffic. The platform will also utilize a "rapid product launch" model to allocate traffic and promote products, discovering high-quality offerings and guiding merchants to improve product quality. This measure aims to break down unfair traffic distribution, allowing high-quality products to stand out and encouraging merchants to improve product quality and competitiveness.

4. Creating Flexible Daily Sales Scenarios, Building a Healthy Business Structure

Taobao and Tmall will optimize and upgrade daily sales scenarios, reducing the duration of annual large-scale promotional events and launching new daily marketing tools. This aims to help merchants achieve a healthier business structure, reduce dependence on large-scale promotional events, and build a more stable business model. Flexible and diverse sales scenarios will provide merchants with more opportunities, improve their operational flexibility, and ultimately achieve sustainable development.

II. Upgraded Merchant Rights Protection Measures, Enhanced Merchant Service Experience

Taobao and Tmall will further improve merchant rights protection measures and enhance the merchant service experience, creating a fairer and more transparent platform environment.

5. Improved "Refund Only" Handling Mechanism, Increased Intervention in Abnormal Behavior

For merchants providing good service, Taobao and Tmall will not proactively intervene to support "refund only," instead guiding sellers and consumers to resolve issues through negotiation. For all merchants, the platform provides a quick appeal channel; if the appeal is successful, the platform will compensate the merchant for their losses. Simultaneously, the platform will upgrade the "refund only" identification model, increasing the interception of abnormal behavior, comprehensively governing "wool parties," and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of merchants.

6. Upgraded Platform Abnormal Order Identification Model, Refund of Abnormal Order Promotion Fees

Alibaba Mama will upgrade the platform's abnormal order identification model to identify abnormal orders (such as "wool party" behavior) in scenarios such as full refunds and instant refunds, automatically refunding the corresponding promotion fees to merchants without requiring additional applications. Furthermore, Alibaba Mama will launch "optimized net transaction" capabilities, using AI technology to improve the effectiveness of merchant promotion investment and increase advertising investment efficiency and returns.

7. Strengthened Merchant Communication, Establishment of Service Provider Certification Channels

Taobao and Tmall plan to hold over 100 merchant opinion forums to extensively and thoroughly communicate with merchants on advertising, marketing activities, industry rules, and traffic mechanisms. This aims to strengthen communication and interaction with merchants, promptly understand their needs and feedback, and continuously optimize platform rules and services.

III. Continuously Reducing Merchant Cost Burden, Promoting Increased Merchant Profitability

Taobao and Tmall will use multiple measures to continuously reduce merchant cost burdens and improve merchant profitability.

8. Upgraded "Return Treasure" Fee Reduction Policy, Estimated Annual Savings of 6 Billion RMB for Merchants

In 2025, the platform will continue to optimize the "Return Treasure" fee reduction policy, with an estimated annual savings of over 6 billion RMB for merchants. The platform will also open deposit fulfillment insurance; currently, 78 categories can use deposit fulfillment insurance to join Tmall, and it will continue to lower the basic deposit for some categories and add new categories such as health and home decoration. In addition, it will offer deposit reduction benefits for multiple stores under the same entity on Tmall Global.

9. Cancellation of Tmall Annual Fees, Expansion of Commission Reduction, Exemption, and Rebate Coverage

In 2025, Taobao and Tmall will continue to implement the cancellation of "platform annual software service fees" for 193 categories, and before January 27th, fully refund the basic software service fees for merchants with "annual transactions less than 120,000 RMB," covering 5.2 million merchants. Tmall Global will also initiate preparations for a year-fee refund measure for eligible new merchants. At the same time, Tmall will continue to promote live-streaming commission rebates, and plans to implement phased commission reductions and exemptions in the home furnishing, fresh food, and commercial/office furniture industries, with Tmall Global continuing its live-streaming rebate policy.

10. Optimization of AI Tools, Certain Reduction in Merchant Operating Costs

Taobao and Tmall will continue to increase investment in AIGC technology to help merchants reduce costs in daily operations, advertising creativity, and marketing materials. The AI tool "Wantsang Creation" will produce over 100 million images and videos for over 1 million merchants this year; the "AI Assistant" will address product incubation and audience operation issues; and the Dianxiaomiao AI product will provide pre-sales AI guidance, after-sales self-service, and other personalized AI intelligent services, significantly improving operational efficiency and reducing labor costs.

IV. Deepening the Integrity System, Continuously Optimizing the Merchant Business Environment

Taobao and Tmall will deepen the construction of the integrity system to create a fair and just business environment.

11. Pioneering Account Integrity System, Jointly Building a Healthy E-commerce Ecosystem

For abnormal "refund only" situations, return package tampering, false returns, and the use of online/photoshopped images, merchants can report these incidents through feedback, and the platform will take action such as rejecting after-sales service, single-store, or platform purchase restrictions as deemed appropriate. For professional "wool parties," Taobao and Tmall will cooperate with merchants and relevant departments to pursue legal responsibility.

12. Comprehensive Optimization of Platform Rules, Continuous Improvement of Merchant Experience

Taobao and Tmall will continue to optimize platform rules to improve the merchant experience. Specific measures include piloting a function in "Return Treasure" allowing merchants to choose to provide return shipping fees for some users; uncoupling Taobao merchants' "Return Treasure" from Taobao's large-scale promotions, allowing merchants to choose whether to use "Return Treasure" during platform promotions; adding a Taobao and Tmall price error protection mechanism, where the platform will balance the interests of all parties and provide various handling methods based on individual cases; and further clarifying industry standards and dispute resolution guidelines for prominent issues in dispute resolution, currently being promoted in the apparel, jewelry, and pet industries.

In conclusion, Taobao and Tmall's twelve 2025 merchant empowerment initiatives cover funding support, traffic allocation, rights protection, cost reduction, and integrity system construction. These initiatives demonstrate the platform's commitment to merchant development and its pursuit of a healthy e-commerce ecosystem. The implementation of these measures will effectively improve the merchant business environment, promote high-quality development of the platform economy, and ultimately achieve a win-win-win situation for merchants, consumers, and the platform.

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