The world's largest online shopping frenzy -- China's "Double Eleven" festival -- begins in just under two hours. For millions of Chinese, they'll be stuck to their laptops or devices trying to get discounts and deals on their favorite products. But for many foreigners living in the country, the leading e-commerce sites, such as Taobao, have been pretty much inaccessible due to the language barriers. However, that may be all about to change this year thanks to three Americans living in Shanghai. Sun Caiqin brings us this.

 

Charles Erickson, Tyler McNew and Jay Thornhill are co-founders of Baopals, a website that displays all the products on Taobao and Tmall in English, so that users who can't read Chinese can now easily access product information. Most foreigners in China cannot read Chinese; the three people spotted this problem and started the company two years ago to help foreigners purchase products on Taobao, the most convenient online shopping platform with over 1 million stores on it.

 

CHARLES ERIKSON HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, BAOPALS I was very lucky that Tyler was a programmer, he was asking, look, I don't like my job programming right now for this company, can you come up with some ideas for apps because at that time app was a big thing. And then I thought about this Taobao problem.

 

TYLER MCNEW HEAD OF TECH DEVELOPMENT, BAOPALS At the beginning, it was just from my friends, a lot of our close friends just chipping in like 5,000 here, and 5,000 there, just kind of keep us flow.

 

JAY THRONHILL HEAD OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT, BAOPALS As soon as it was functional, we launched even though it was full of problems, poorly designed. We just got it out there as quickly as possible, because we knew that people would start using it and then we could keep it improving.

 

Months later, Baopals developed into a growing company with a team of 33 people, with 20,000 registered users and 800,000 product items already purchased using the site. Baopals charges a buyer 5 percent of the item price as a commission. In the past 19 months, the company made 42.5 million yuan worth of revenues.

 

China's biggest annual online shopping extravaganza "Double 11" will begin tomorrow, with nearly all the products offered at a cheaper price than usual to drive customer sales on Taobao. This shopping frenzy will generate an estimated 10 billion parcels to be delivered across China. Baopals said it will be a very exciting though stressful time for them as well.

 

CHARLES ERIKSON HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, BAOPALS The first thing we have to do is do a little bit of research, every year "Double 11" is a bit different, so we have to know exactly what Alibaba is planning to do, what type of deals, what type of promotions are going on. And how we could bring all these promotion, all these deals easily to our customers.

 

The trio's company won this year's "Top 10 Up-and-Coming Entrepreneurs in Shanghai" award set up by Shanghai Human Resource and Social Security Bureau.

 

YANG YONGHUA DEPUTY DIRECTOR, SH HUMAN RESOURCE & SOCIAL SECURITY BUREAU This is the fifth time we held the star-up competition. In the past years, all of contestants are Chinese locals. But lately, we found there are more foreigners taking part in this competition, which proves that Shanghai embraces all types of good business ideas, regardless of where you are from and of what language you speak.

 

SUN CAIQIN SHANGHAI The Shanghai Human Resource and Social Security Bureau said the prize also comes with 50,000 yuan in cash. The other winners are in areas such as biotechnology, medical equipment and robotic manufacturing, as Shanghai is transforming itself into a science and technology center.

 

Baopals said they are very happy that they have earned Alibaba's respect just after a year, and the e-commerce giant has publicly endorsed Baopals.