Taobao.com, an online marketplace owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, wants to help people manage their money by offering fund products.

Taobao.com, which gets 100 million daily visits on average, on Friday opened a vertical site named Licai, which means financial management in English, offering shoppers a convenient way to buy fund products.

At least 17 Chinese fund companies have started to sell money market funds, and bond and stock funds through Taobao.com, according to a press release from Alibaba on Friday.

Alibaba said that Taobao.com had received a no-objection letter from the China Securities Regulatory Commission permitting funds to be sold on the website.

That makes Taobao.com the first Internet company to offer such a service in China.

"We want more people to understand that fund products are nothing mysterious and the threshold to buy such products is not high," said Yuan Leiming, an executive of Alibaba's small and micro financial services group.

Yuan added that selling fund products online is just part of the company's plan for expansion into Internet finance.

Baidu Inc, the biggest Internet search provider in China, has also moved into financial services by launching an online finance management product, called Baifa, in late October.

The rumored annual yield of 8 percent attracted so many prospective depositors that Baidu's system crashed within 30 minutes after the product was launched.

After a brief outage, Baidu reported that all of the 1 billion yuan ($163 million) worth of the financial product had been sold by 2:50 pm, five hours after the launch.