Detailed Report: Taobao Website Infrastructure and Payment Systems

This report provides a detailed analysis of Taobao, a prominent e-commerce website owned by Alibaba. It begins with an overview of Taobao's website content, including product categories, search functionalities, and user interface elements. The report then delves into the hardware infrastructure, discussing RAM, graphics cards, processors, and storage requirements. Following this, the software components are examined, focusing on programming languages like PHP, web servers, and database systems such as Oracle and Apache Hadoop. Security issues, including data breaches and the use of Alipay's encryption, are also addressed. Finally, the report explores Taobao's payment and transaction processes, detailing the role of Alipay, payment methods, and partnerships with financial institutions. The report references several academic sources to support its claims.

Running Head: TAOBAO
Website Infrastructure
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1TAOBAO
Website
Website Content
Alibaba owns this website, it was registered in the year 2003. It is one the online
shopping website with the biggest e-commerce platform. It is a customer-to- customer
marketplace. The domain of Taobao is registered to Alibab Group’s cloud computing. It has
varied range of products nearly one million as of 2016. The website has reached three trillion
yuan combined with another site of the Alibaba Group only.
The website contents of Taobao are; it has a search bar at the top middle position, at the top left
corner the name of the website is written, below that the categories of the items are present with
women wear, men’s wear, shoes, jewellery, furniture or appliances, home decors, mobile
phones,. Digital section, travel appliances, products for Mother and baby, office requirements
and beauty products. All these categories also has sub-categories too. The top right side of the
website has log-in and sign-up section, beside that a barcode is give usable for the oversea users
and next to that the shopping cart section is present. The centre of the website contains a life
running as of the latest available products of Taobao (World.taobao.com 2020). The rest of the
web page contains the famous products of the website displaying with their prices. Some
examples of the products available in the category of computer appliances are the keyboard,
chassis, Motherboard, cooling equipment for the overall system. CPU, desktop memory, set of
keyboard and mouse, high graphics card, sound card, CD, DVD, TV box, Power supply. Hence,
the overall set of computer and its peripheral are available.
The lower part of the website contains the classifications of the website, contract details
and merchant and consumer guide, lastly all the associated partners of the website is represent by
their official logo.

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Hardware Infrastructure
The most commonly hardware infrastructure are present to provide a support to the
website. The use of the hardware are carried out for storing, analyzing, and processing of data
generated in a website (Shenglin et al. 2017). Nowadays the hardware infrastructure is situated at
a data center and managed by the company or some third party to make the operation less time
consuming as well as easy for the company to handle less work and focus on their productivity.
The hardware present for the undertaken website are as follows:
RAM: that is the random access memory is available for 32-bit of one gigabyte (GB) or for 64-
bit it is two gigabyte (GB).
The graphics card used for running the website is Direct X 9.
The processor on which the website runs are of SoC,
The space of the hard-disk is for 32-bite it is 16 gigabyte and for 64-bit it is 20 gigabyte.
The display will be nearly of 800*600.
The additional requirement is the clustering as it attends huge traffic in their website (Van
Hieu and Meesad 2015). Hence, a number of computer systems are required with back-up
requirement.
Software
The most important6 and crucial portion of any website is its software components as the
whole business is dependent on the functionalities of the software. The faster and efficient the
software the faster the profit of the business (Guihang, Qian and Guangfan 2014). The server
runs on the software only. It has the largest services of cloud computing at a cheap rate. The
website of Taobao is writer in PHP, this is mainly at the server side language, the web server is
Tengine, the website page is formed by the use of static HTML, JS, CSS, the software stack used

3TAOBAO
by the website is CDN and the localized content is by Apache 2 (Kalderimis et al. 2014).
Another server it operate in is RedHat Linus. The database of the company is much complicated
and the data available is huge due it high demand by the customers. OpenGraph is used by the
website for structuring the data. Oracle has been a huge help in handling the large amount of
data. The distribution system of the database is managed by the Apache Hadoop.
Security Issues
The security of Taobao have been on the news for a longer period of time. As it an e-
commerce website hence it deals with a huge number of people accessing the website all
throughout the day. The customers as well as the merchants of the Taobao website have to
provide their personal as well as their financial data on the website to perform the activities of
the website. Taobao has their own transaction system named as Alipay that uses encryption of
SSL for the information protection of the merchants and buyers (Wu and Zhao 2015). It happens
to be the most trusted system for security of the online website. The security issue that have been
accounted was the leakage of the user data, the e-banking website associated with Taobao was
the Citibank and it got hacked and some information of the users of Taobao got leaked.
The hackers have extracted nearly 20 million users’ names and passwords, then used
them to log into the accounts of Taobao to place fake orders through the clod platform of
Alibaba as Taobao shares the same cloud services of Alibaba only. However, the spokesperson
of Taobao has stated that the hacking was not successful and they have alerted their customer
beforehand for changing their account’s password (Wang, Krishnamurthy and Wetherall 2014).
Many enterprise of china had faced several security threats and cyber-attacks. Hence, they have
asked for defensive wall of protection like the websites of western countries.

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Payment/Transaction Process
Taobao being the huge marketplace for varied range of products, it has developed its own
payment system, which is known as Alipay, It a third party platform for the transaction process.
It has partnered with institutions of finance such as MasterCard, Visa and some of the domestics
banks that are present in China. The system of Ailypay is very simple as the website deals
business with customer to customer, therefore when a buyer buys some item from the website,
the money through online transaction is kept in the transaction system for temporarily and if the
confirmation regarding the transaction is obtained from the buyer, the money is then sent to the
seller (Lu 2018). The most common payment methods that are available for the customers are
debit card, credit cards of visa, master card and Paypal. They also accept the RBK Money, wire
transfer through the local banks of China, Webmoney, western union and contact.

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Reference
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Lu, L., 2018. Decoding Alipay: mobile payments, a cashless society and regulatory challenges.
Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, pp.40-43.
Shenglin, B., Simonelli, F., Ruidong, Z., Bosc, R. and Wenwei, L., 2017. Digital infrastructure:
overcoming digital divide in emerging economies. G20 Insights, 3.
Van Hieu, D. and Meesad, P., 2015, October. A Cell-MST-Based method for big dataset
clustering on limited memory computers. In 2015 7th International Conference on Information
Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE) (pp. 632-637). IEEE.
Wang, X.S., Krishnamurthy, A. and Wetherall, D., 2014, November. How much can we micro-
cache web pages?. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference
(pp. 249-256).
World.taobao.com. (2020). 淘 淘 淘 ( 淘 淘 淘 ). [online] Available at: https://world.taobao.com/
[Accessed 21 Jan. 2020].
Wu, H. and Zhao, L., 2015. Web Security: A WhiteHat Perspective. Auerbach Publications.