Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce business is divided into two parts: International Station and AliExpress. Alibaba International Station is the world’s largest B2B trade market, with more than 2.3 million registered corporate members, covering more than 200 countries and regions, and covering more than 34 import and export industries. It has been rated as the world’s best B2B website by Forbes magazine for seven consecutive years. It mainly provides export marketing and promotion services to help small and medium-sized enterprises expand international trade. It is based on the Alibaba International Station trading platform, the world’s leading enterprise-to-enterprise e-commerce website. By displaying and promoting suppliers’ companies and products to overseas buyers, and then obtaining trade opportunities and orders, it is the preferred network platform for export companies to expand international trade.
“Alibaba International Station” provides a full range of online services and tools such as one-stop store decoration, product display, marketing promotion, business negotiation and store management, helping companies reduce costs and efficiently develop the large foreign trade market. On Alibaba International Station, overseas buyers can search for sellers and publish procurement information, and sellers can search for sellers and publish company products and product information. As a B2B trading platform, Alibaba International Station provides communication tools and account management tools for buyers and sellers, and provides many conveniences for online transactions between the two parties.
AliExpress is also an online trading platform built by Alibaba for the global market, and is called the international version of “Taobao” by many sellers. Since its launch in April 2010, after more than 4 years of rapid development, it has now covered overseas buyers in more than 220 countries and regions, and the daily traffic of overseas buyers has exceeded 50 million. AliExpress adopts a model of charging a 5% handling fee for successful transactions and no fee for unsuccessful transactions. It is now gradually developing into a business model of charging different handling fee ratios for different categories, different payment methods and different transaction amounts.
AliExpress is the most popular cross-border online shopping platform in Russia, with transaction volume accounting for 35% of the total value of Russia’s cross-border online shopping market, followed by eBay, which accounts for 30%, and Amazon, which accounts for 7.5%. AliExpress not only has an English main site, but also has Russian and Portuguese sub-sites, and plans to establish an Indonesian sub-site, showing a trend of expansion into Southeast Asia.
AliExpress’s advantage lies in its low transaction fee rate, which is a clear advantage over other competitors. With abundant Taobao product resources and its Taobao consignment function, sellers can easily sell Taobao products to the world with one click. AliExpress also provides sellers with one-stop product translation, listing, payment, logistics and other services. In addition, with the popularity of Alibaba International Station, related alliance sites in various continents, Google online promotion and other channels, AliExpress has also introduced a steady stream of high-quality traffic.