1 is a big marketplace for those small sells, it's free for all. no charging fee, no extra hidden fee. of course the sells can buy the paid service, such as Zhitongche, it's a paid service just like adwords.
and another part is Tianmao, a new department / independent of taobao， Tianmao is for those Business and brand such as LV, Apple. It's paid market, you need pay 50-150K (Guarantee Fee) to join, and Tianmao will hold 2%-5% of transactions as profit.
And the Alipay (Zhifubao, also belong to Alibaba group), is the ONLY paygate of Taobao. with Alipay, the buyers can use almost all of the debit / credit card to pay for the orders. The Alipay handling all the transactions. If anyone want to pay with other way, such as post, or wire-trans or other offline pay service , the account will be banned.
There also COD service in Taobao now.... for more you can contact me : moonswamp # gmail.com
it's true. the sellers prepared for this promotion sell for almost a month, the promotion sell start from 24:00, and also it's weekend.. most of buyers stay there waiting for paying. the first package arrived to the buyers in 1 hour, at 01:00 a.m. - A true story! It's not taobao handling the delivery, it's sellers, they have to deliver the goods as soon as possiable...cos too many orders,,, it's toooooooooooo many...