Analysis of the world’s four major cross-border e-commerce platforms: Amazon, eBay, Wish and AliExpress

In the e-commerce market in recent years, from the perspective of Chinese sellers, competition in the cross-border e-commerce industry has become increasingly fierce, mainly dominated by four major platforms: Amazon, eBay, Wish and AliExpress. The cross-border sales of these four major platforms have reached hundreds of billions of dollars, and their daily visits and traffic are more than ten times that of smaller platforms.

First of all, eBay, as one of the earliest cross-border e-commerce platforms to enter the Chinese market, entered the market through the acquisition of eBay in 2002. Many sellers of 3C electronic products concentrated in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen and merchants in Shanghai quickly seized this opportunity and began to open accounts on eBay and use the distribution model to sell Chinese goods overseas. A seller once said: “Before 2008, selling goods on eBay was just about making money. As long as you dared to do it, there was no way you wouldn’t make money.”

Secondly, there is AliExpress. This platform was launched by Alibaba in April 2010. Its original intention was to help small and medium-sized sellers achieve rapid sales in small and multiple batches, so it is called the “international version of Taobao”. The rapid rise of AliExpress has attracted a large number of sellers from Zhejiang, Guangzhou and Fujian who usually trade on domestic Taobao. It is worth noting that AliExpress’s performance in Russia is particularly significant. In 2018, up to 90% of the 290 million cross-border packages sent from China to Russia came from AliExpress.

Next is Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce platform, which has also strongly attracted Chinese sellers. Since 2012, Amazon has begun to recruit Chinese sellers to its US site and other sites. By 2015, the global sales revenue of Chinese seller Anker has reached an eye-catching US$193.1 million. As more and more sellers join, data shows that the proportion of Chinese sellers among million-dollar sellers has also increased from 2016 to 2016. It rose from 24% in 2019 to 38% in October 2019.

Finally, since Wish was founded in 2014, the average daily downloads of its application have been stable at around 100,000 times. The Wish platform is favored by consumers for its high-quality and low-priced products and excellent mobile customer experience. Although its main seller group is mainly Chinese sellers, the product types are mainly small, light, and convenient products.