Officials for eTao, the online shopping search engine that was soft-launched last year by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, yesterday revealed the company’s strategy for bringing some transparency to China’s boisterous business-to-consumer (B2C) market.

China already has more than 12,200 online shopping websites andan additional200 are being added every month, making it increasingly confusing for consumers to choose products and complete purchases, eTao officials said at a press conference in Beijing.

eTao, which is still in beta, is being developed as a dedicated”one-stop”platform to help shoppers cut through the noise. The site allows consumers to conduct product searches encompassing more than 5,000 online merchants, check out product reviews, get information on shipping, compare prices and otherwise make more informed buying decisions. Alibaba Group plans to invest RMB1 billion to market and promote eTao with the aim of increasing traffic volume and channeling users to some 5,000 shopping sites that are indexed by eTao’s search robots, officials said.

Eddie Wu, eTao president, stressed that one of his company’s key initiatives is a standardized registration system thatletsconsumers shop on hundreds of sites using a single user name and password.

Currently website registration is not standardized in China, which meanse-shoppers tend to stick to just a handful of sites where they have already set up accounts. Officials for eTao said statistics indicate consumers regularly visit no more than five sites because of this, which limits their ability to comparison shop.

About 600 websites, among them major retailers Gome, Vancl, Yihaodian and Nike China, have integrated eTao’s login system into their websites so customers can sign in and complete purchases using their Alipay or Taobao usernames and passwords.

While some major Chinese e-tailers see the value in a search platform dedicated to shopping, it’s not yet clear whether consumers will embrace the technology. In the third quarter, general search site Baidu remained China’s search-engine leader with a 78% share of search advertising revenue, according to market analyst iResearch. eTao has yet to show up on the radar ofresearchersthat track China’s search market.

Despite this, some B2C site operators are worried about eTao’s potentialclout with consumers. Controversy erupted last week when 360Buy.com, one of China’s largest and fastest-growing shopping sites, moved to block eTao’s search robots so that information pulled from 360Buy would not show up on eTao. 360buy officials did not say why they did not want to be included in search results, but industry observers speculated the website feared eTao would rig consumer searches to favor Taobao Mall and Taobao Marketplace e-tailers so that they placed higher in search rankings than 360Buy.

Taobao Mall and Taobao Marketplace, China’s top B2C and C2C (consumer-to-consumer) websites, are owned by Alibaba Group and are eTao’s sister companies.

Wu, eTao’s president, insisted yesterday that eTao was an “agnostic” platform and that Taobao merchants did not enjoy any advantages over other shopping websites. “As an open platform and search engine, eTao aims to help more business-to-consumer and online shopping companies grow and improve,” Wu said.

He argued that as competition in Chinese e-commerce intensifies, Chinese shopping websites are increasingly engaging in costly marketing and advertising campaigns to drive traffic—campaigns that in the past have proven to be inefficient and wasteful. Consolidating product information on a single site such as eTao is a better way to drive traffic, he said.

As a result of 360Buy’s actions, eTao has stopped indexing 360Buy product information but will continue to collect 360Buy product pricing information from other websites “because we believe consumers have the right to have this information,” Wu said.

Two other websites that moved to block eTao, Dangdang and Suning, are “not opposed to comparison shopping” and are talking to eTao about collaborating, Wu said. Dangdang officials reportedly objected to eTao’s access and use of product reviews. Dangdangspent years amassing the reviews from customers and does not want the informationshared with the general public without permission.