As someone who lives in Shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. However, as an expat who can't speak Chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.

Need something simple and don't know where to get it? If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."

The issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. Images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough Chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. I've set aside an hour before to make an account but I could not complete the task.

I wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation.