Chinese e-commerce company JD.com Inc (JD) is poised to steal market share from rival Alibaba Group Holding's taobao.com after it launches a similar website of its own in June.

JD will launch the beta version of an updated paipai.com, which the firm bought from Internet service giant Tencent Holdings in March, a company spokesperson told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"Some notable changes in the website's interface will be seen in the updated paipai.com," the spokesperson said.

The news was announced right after the company, China's largest online direct sales retailer, raised $1.78 billion after going public on NASDAQ Thursday US time. Its top competitor, Alibaba, filed its prospectus for what could be the world's biggest IPO to the US securities regulatory body on May 6.

Launching paipai.com would be the first attempt made by JD, which runs highly successful business-to-consumer (B2C) site jd.com, to try out the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) model.

While consumers buy products from companies online under the B2C model, customers purchase from their peers under the C2C model.

JD's move will put itself in head-to-head competition with Alibaba, whose taobao.com dominates the C2C market, while its jd.com is already in cutthroat competition with Alibaba's B2C website tmall.com.

According to a statement that JD e-mailed to the Global Times on Tuesday, the company's CEO Richard Liu Qiangdong has vowed several times to "invest a large amount of money in developing paipai.com" during internal meetings.

JD said it would "rebuild paipai.com" so as to extend its current main customer base of professionals in urban areas to college students and households in fourth- and fifth-tier cities, the statement said.

On Monday, JD's senior vice president Xu Lei said that the firm will soon allow buyers to place orders for products listed on jd.com using Tencent's WeChat, an instant messaging smartphone app that has more than 600 million users.

This move puts JD in direct competition again with Alibaba, but on the mobile front.

According to Beijng-based iRearch Consulting Group, the smartphone app of taobao.com took 76.4 percent of the mobile shopping market in the first quarter, while jd.com's app took 6.9 percent.

JD will also use paipai.com to enrich its current B2C product portfolio, which focuses on consumer electronics and maternal products, to cover agricultural products, fresh food and imported goods. The company also plans to strengthen the second-hand products auction function of paipai.com.

Lu Zhenwang, founder of Shanghai Wanqing Consulting, told the Global Times on Tuesday that it would take at least one to two years for paipai.com to have a strong impact on taobao.com.

"Taobao.com has a huge number of sellers and its model is very mature. Paipai.com, on the other hand, has a much smaller portfolio of products, fewer sellers, and a weaker management team," Lu said.

"Therefore, it will take a long time for paipai.com to catch up."

According to iResearch, 456.44 billion yuan ($73.08 billion) of products were sold online in the first quarter of 2014, up 27.6 percent from a year earlier.

B2C websites contributed to 40 percent of sales in the first quarter and C2C sites took up the rest, an iResearch report shows.

Zhu Li, a Beijing resident and a regular buyer on taobao.com, told the Global Times that she is interested in trying paipai.com only when it has big discounts.

"There is no need for me to switch from taobao.com to paipai.com completely, because the former has everything I need," said Zhu, who spent 800 yuan on taobao.com and tmall.com in April.

Taobao.com, though vastly popular among online shoppers, has been criticized for being plagued with counterfeit products.

The problem is so severe that experts believe it would hurt Alibaba's proposed share price for the IPO.

JD pledged to "eliminate knock-offs" on paipai.com.

Paipai.com needs to control the quality of its sellers at an early stage, before the number of fake products uncontrollably soars, like what happened to taobao.com, Mo Daiqing, an analyst with Hangzhou-based E-Commerce Research Center, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

JD said it plans to start inviting sellers to launch stores on paipai.com in the next few days.