Taobao.com,?China's largest online shopping platform, yesterday said it will invest 300 million yuan (US$45 million) in the next three years to subsidize and support third-party software and service providers.

"Taobao's major challenge comes from the ever-growing demand from customers and vendors, and the best way to solve this problem is to open our platform to welcome more service providers," said Lu Zhaoxi, Taobao's chief executive officer.

Taobao will encourage these service providers by giving them subsidies and Taobao will offer them more room to develop, said Zhang Yong, chief financial officer of Taobao.

"We will focus on medium and large service providers, and Taobao will take 30 percent of the income, leaving 70 percent for the application developers," said Wang Wenbin, vice president of Taobao.

The four major sectors that applications developers should focus on are helping vendors to market their products, analyzing statistics of visitors and shoppers, wireless transaction tools and daily information closely connected with consumer needs.

Since the open platform was launched in late 2009, Taobao has attracted 110,000 partners, and applications have expanded to cover several areas, including logistics, warehouse management, wireless service and customer service.

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