Given Baidu’s success in China especially its search engine market size, it’s hard to believe that the company is going to launch a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading community. Perhaps it’s even harder for me to imagine that they’re working on an online payment service, a sort of online Web service that enable their “future” online merchants to offer transactional financing. A picture that shown in the above, is the interface of BaiFuBao, their secret new online payment site.

This BaiFuBao will be launched on the Web concurrently with its C2C platform in the coming near future. At this moment, there are no details on how this BaiFuBao will be functioned, what is the payment flow, fee structure, the cap on financed amounts, and most important is what actions that Baidu will be taken to mitigate the risks of the China’s online payment fraud.

It seem to me that Baidu is very committed to coming after Alibaba, which owned TaoBao, the leading C2C provider in China, and Alibaba’s payment provider Alipay. Although Alibaba was by no means the fierce competitor Baidu had to face, no forget about eBay China, they now have a venture partner called Tom, as well as the eBay EachNet platform. Now the incoming battle was much more publicized, especially TaoBao has announced that it has blocked Baidu from indexing its product items listed on the site.