In recent years, from the perspective of Chinese sellers, the four giants in cross-border e-commerce platforms are: Amazon, eBay, Wish and AliExpress. The annual cross-border sales of these four platforms are at the level of hundreds of billions, and the daily visits and traffic are more than ten times that of ordinary small platforms.
The first is eBay. In 2002, eBay entered China by acquiring Eachnet. At this time, a large number of sellers concentrated in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, who were engaged in 3C electronic products and in Shanghai, knew the business opportunities and took the lead in opening accounts on eBay, selling Chinese products to foreigners through distribution. A seller once said frankly: “Before 2008, selling goods on eBay was just lying down and making money. As long as you dare to do it, there is no way to make money.”
The second is AliExpress. In order to help small and medium-sized sellers complete small batches and fast sales, Alibaba launched a global e-commerce platform AliExpress in April 2010, which was called “the international version of Taobao” by many sellers. Because of the rise of AliExpress, many sellers who were originally engaged in domestic Taobao in Zhejiang, Guangzhou and Fujian officially settled in. Among them, the Russian site of AliExpress performed particularly well. In 2018, 90% of the 290 million cross-border parcels sent to Russia came from China.
The next is Amazon. As the world’s largest e-commerce platform, Amazon has attracted countless sellers, including Chinese sellers. In 2012, Amazon began to recruit Chinese sellers to settle in the US site and other sites; in 2015, Chinese seller Anker’s global sales revenue reached US$193.1 million. For a time, the number of Chinese sellers grew rapidly. Among its million-dollar sellers, the proportion of Chinese sellers increased from 24% in 2016 to 38% in October 2019.
Finally, there is Wish. Wish is a platform established in 2014, and the average daily download volume of the APP is stable at around 100,000. The products on the Wish platform are of high quality and low price, and the customer experience on the mobile terminal is very good, which has been recognized by consumers. There are many Chinese sellers on the platform, and they mainly sell small and light products with high profits.