The establishment of Alibaba in 1999 kicked off the development of cross-border e-commerce in China. Initially, Alibaba China Suppliers was just a yellow page on the Internet, displaying product information of Chinese companies to global customers, positioning itself as a B2B mass trade buyer. The buyer learned about the seller’s product information through the Alibaba platform, and then the two parties negotiated and concluded the transaction offline, so at that time Most of the transactions are done offline.
Around 2000, a small number of domestic sellers began to try cross-border e-commerce on foreign platforms such as eBay and Amazon, but they did not achieve scale.
Dunhuang.com was established in Beijing in 2004. Different from the positioning of Alibaba’s Chinese supplier online yellow pages, Dunhuang.com focuses on buyers and sellers completing transactions online. Most of the transactions that occur on Dunhuang.com are small-amount B2B trades.
Lanting Jishi was established in 2007. It is a B2C platform that integrates domestic supply chains and sells goods abroad under the name of Lanting Jishi.
Alibaba AliExpress was established in 2009. At the beginning, AliExpress used B2C and C2C as its main cross-border trade models. With the development of AliExpress, many domestic e-commerce sellers and traditional foreign trade sellers have gradually joined the B2C cross-border e-commerce industry; in the past few years, AliExpress has quickly caught up with other platforms and become the most concentrated cross-border e-commerce platform for domestic sellers. business platform.
From 2010 to 2014, the team of domestic cross-border e-commerce sellers grew rapidly, and many sellers also entered various e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay.
The Wish platform was launched in 2013, and Chinese sellers began to settle on the Wish platform in 2014.
In 2015, the State Council established the China (Hangzhou) Cross-border E-Commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone; in 2016, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hefei, Zhengzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, Shenzhen, A total of 12 cities in Suzhou have been set up as the second batch of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones; as of 2018, a total of 35 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones have been established across the country.
Starting from April 2016, AliExpress will cancel the C2C trade model and only corporate sellers can enter and operate; starting from 2017, AliExpress will require that all goods sold by sellers must have registered trademarks.
In 2016, Alibaba acquired the Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada and competed with Shopee and other platforms in Southeast Asia
In 2017, the “Tmall Overseas” project was officially launched, bringing the Tmall platform to nearly 2 billion domestic products were sold around the world, serving nearly 100 million Chinese living overseas.
As of 2018, the Ministry of Commerce and other seven ministries and commissions have established 14 “market procurement trade pilots” across the country, and the cross-border e-commerce B2C export compliance management policies have gradually become clear.
In recent years, the cross-border e-commerce industry has developed rapidly in China, and more and more companies are aware of the business opportunities and good future development prospects of this industry. In more than seven years, China’s cross-border e-commerce sellers have grown from scratch and gradually formed a scale. The basic skills of “selling globally” such as teamwork, supply chain management, and cross-border logistics have been used in major promotions such as “Double 11” one after another. hone. As supporting policies related to cross-border e-commerce become increasingly complete, these well-trained seller teams will become an important force in China’s participation in international retail market competition in the future.