A large e-commerce platform supporting retailers with disabilities

Taobao’s 10,000 Merchants Programme helps entrepreneurs with disabilities sell online. Launched in 2023 with Alibaba Foundation support, it offers free e-commerce training, digital tools, accessibility features and community support. By June 2025 over 5,000 merchants were supported.

The Alibaba Foundation was established in 2011 by Alibaba Group, a leading Chinese multinational technology and e-commerce conglomerate. In 2023 the foundation – together with Alibaba´s online shopping platform, Taobao – launched the 10,000 Merchants Programme to support online retailers with disabilities. The programme provides sales training and offers, for example, sign-language avatars to support sales videos, or automatically translating text. In less than three years over 5,000 online retailers with disabilities have benefited.

Problems Targeted

Around 100,000 online retailers with disabilities who operate on the Taobao e-commerce platform in China struggle with low sales due to various challenges.

Solution, Innovation and Impact

Taobao, launched in 2003 by Alibaba Group, a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology, aims to support small businesses and individuals from China to sell their products and services online. In 2023 Alibaba Foundation and Taobao jointly launched the 10,000 Merchants Programme for 10,000 entrepreneurs (merchants) with disabilities who struggled to earn a living from selling their products and services online. The three-year programme provides free e-commerce training (on DingTalk, Alibaba’s collaboration platform), digital tools, community support, and such campaign promotion as live captioning and networking events, as well as an opportunity of financial grants for some. The programme goes hand in hand with Alibaba’s strategy to make all its apps and online services fully accessible, for example, by providing options for translating text and images on Taobao into speech and AI-generated digital avatars, thus enabling hearing-impaired online-retailers to host livestream sessions and promote their products via the platform. In 2024 online stores run by retailers with disabilities completed more than 7.35 million transactions, generating total sales exceeding RMB 600 million (app. $84 million). By June 2025, over 5,000 merchants with disabilities had received support.

Funding, Outlook and Transferability

The programme is funded by the Alibaba Foundation, which commits 0.3 per cent of annual revenue to public welfare, including 1 million yuan ($140,000) dedicated to this initiative. A standardized full-process support framework – covering training, incubation, resource matching, and community operations – makes the model replicable and scalable. (#ZeroCall26)

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