Tmall

Tmall.com was first introduced by Taobao in April 2008 as Taobao Mall (simplified Chinese: 淘宝商城; traditional Chinese: 淘寶商城; pinyin: Táobǎo Shāngchéng), a dedicated B2C platform within its consumer e-commerce website. The key difference between Tmall and Taobao is that Tmall is a B2C platform, while Taobao is C2C.

In November 2010, Taobao Mall launched an independent web domain, tmall.com, to differentiate listings by its merchants, who are either brand owners or authorized distributors, from Taobao's C2C merchants. Meanwhile, it kicked off a US$30 million advertising campaign to raise brand awareness among consumers. It also announced an enhanced focus on product verticals and improvements in shopping experience.

In June 2011, Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO Jack Ma announced a major restructuring of Taobao through an internal email. It was reorganized into three separate companies. As a result, Tmall.com became an independent business under Alibaba Group. The other two businesses that resulted from the reorganization are Taobao Marketplace (a C2C marketplace) and eTao (a shopping search engine). The move was said to be necessary for Taobao to "meet competitive threats that emerged in the past two years during which the Internet and e-commerce landscape has changed dramatically".

In October 2011, Tmall.com experienced two successive waves of online rioting since it significantly increased fees on online vendors. The service fees rose from 6,000 yuan ($940) to 60,000 yuan ($9,400) a year, and a compulsory fixed sum deposit went from 10,000 yuan ($1,570) to up to 150,000 yuan ($23,500). According to Tmall.com, the price increase was intended to help weed out merchants that are too often a source of fakes, shoddy products and poor customer service. Stores that earn top ratings for service and quality from customers and high sales volumes are entitled to partial or full refunds.

On January 11, 2012, TMall.com officially changed its Chinese name to Tiān Māo (天猫), the Chinese pronunciation of Tmall, which literally means "sky cat".

Tmall held a 51.3% share of the Chinese B2C online product sales market in Q1 2013.

In February 2014, Alibaba launched Tmall Global as a cross-border marketplace for foreign brands and merchants to sell directly to Chinese consumers. The cross-border model requires merchants no longer to have a legal entity in China nor hold stock in the country. Some of the biggest flagship stores on Tmall Global include Costco from the US and dm from Germany. Tmall launched as a global shopping site that allowed foreign brands to sell directly to Chinese consumers, even without a business license. By late 2014, the site had 5,400 retailers from 25 countries, with sales surging largely from February to November. Some brand names faced challenges such as advertising restrictions and low brand recognition in China, while Western brands like Nature's Bounty surpassed $700,000 in November sales by bypassing import approvals. Around 30 firms hit $1.61 million each, particularly in categories like food, cosmetics, and electronics. Alibaba encouraged brands to create holiday campaigns and use free trials to boost visibility despite search ranking limits for unlicensed sellers.

In June 2015, Alibaba announced that Tmall would include 11 more countries to its global platform that included foreign brands that are not sold in China. The new countries included U.S., New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, France, Britain, Spain, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Turkey where sellers could directly sell from the platform through their respective country's pavilion. Tmall is different than Alibaba's other platforms because it focuses on cross-border retail rather than international wholesale (Alibaba) or domestic wholesale (1668).