A dog and a computer changed Dong Jian’s life.
Diagnosed at age 2 with progressive spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that destroys muscle control, the Chengdu, China, native found himself 24 years later bedridden with just the use of two fingers and effectively unemployable. To fight his depression, he bought himself a border collie he named Lucky.
And Lucky turned out to be just that. Unable to venture out to buy food and toys for the puppy, Dong and a friend in 2010 hit upon the idea of taking a meager RMB 3,000 in savings and starting an online pet shop dealing in quality animals and pet merchandise. Today, Dong’s Lucky Pet Home store on Taobao Marketplace employs 10 people and takes in RMB 300,000 a month.
More important than the money, Dong says, is the sense of purpose and hope that running a business has brought to his life. He is amonghundreds of disabled Chinese who have turned to e-commerce to open doors that would otherwise be closed to them.
In manufacturing powerhouse China, competition for jobs is fierce and employment opportunities for the country’s estimated 85 million disabled people few. Social stigmas often limit options mainly to low-pay professions such as massage work. Small shops on Taobao, which with a little assistance from friends and family can be run by anyone with a laptop or smartphone, afford those with physical challenges an opportunity to become entrepreneurs, usually with very little start-up capital.
Although Taobao declines to reveal the number of disabled Taobao shop owners, the company over the last several years has provided several programs to assist disabled and disadvantaged people, teaching them basic e-commerce and Internet technical skills to improve their employment chances.
For example, in August, 2013, Taobao’s educational arm, Taobao University, and the company’s in-house charitable organization teamed up with a Shanghai NGO to give e-commerce and graphic arts training to more than 30 deaf students, 11 of whom were later offered internships with five e-commerce companies. Taobao also partnered with an affiliate of the China Disabled Person’s Federation to provide customer service positions its clients, allowing them to work at home while earning an hourly wage of RMB 7-15 yuan for up to six hours a day. In addition, Taobao has offered perks, such as free software tools, to disabled people running websites, among other programs.
One of the beneficiaries is Sun Xia, a 53-year-oldhearing-impaired woman who received RMB 10,000, a computer and e-commerce training as part of a Taobao program that has helped more than 800 struggling mothers since 2006. Sun launched her Taobao shop in May, 2008, selling INMAN-branded fashion apparel. Today she runs her own clothing brand for older women, designing many of the outfits she sells and even modeling the clothes for her online storefront.
“I know demand of women at my age, and this saves a large amount of cost,” Sun explained in an online chat. In 2012, her brand sold merchandise worth RMB 14 million, she says.
Both Dong and Sun have hired disabled persons. Lucky PetHome has four physically challenged employees working as customer service agents, marketers and office workers.
The entrepreneurs stress that running a Taobao store takes dedication, regardless of physical abilities. Dong works from a special bed built with a computer screen suspended above it, and says when he first launched his store he slept less than four hours a day while a partner packed and shipped products.
Starting as a computer illiterate, Sun practiced typing for months to master the keyboard. She can’t hear alerts signaling incoming messages from customers, so at times she has parked herself in front of a computer screen for up to 16 hours a day to ensure she was immediately available. She says she once stayed inside her house for 20 straight days while running the store, subsisting on a diet of cabbage.
Even with hard work, success is far from guaranteed. According to a 2013 survey of 509 disabled or disadvantaged Taobao merchants conducted by AliResearch, the e-commerce research arm of Alibaba Group, Taobao’s parent company, only 17 percent of respondents said their income had gone up after becoming an online store owner.
However, more than three quarters of respondents said running a Taobao shop raised their life satisfaction—even with the long hours.”You have to work hard,” Dong says. “One of my healthy friends, who is selling maternity and baby products online, asked me why his business is poor. I asked, ‘do you feel tired?’ He told me ‘not really.’
“That’s the problem,” Dong says he told his friend. “You have to work harder. Running a Taobao shop should get you exhausted.”
