In recent years, from the perspective of Chinese sellers, the four major cross-border e-commerce platforms are: Amazon, eBay, Wish and AliExpress. The annual cross-border sales of these four major platforms are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and their daily visits and traffic are more than ten times that of ordinary small platforms.
First up is eBay. In 2002, eBay entered China by acquiring eBay. At this time, a large number of sellers focusing on 3C electronic products in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen and in the Shanghai area knew about the business opportunities, took the lead in opening accounts on eBay, and sold Chinese products to foreigners through distribution. A seller once said frankly: “Before 2008, selling on eBay was just a matter of making money. As long as you dared to do it, there was nothing you could do without making money.”
The second is AliExpress. In order to help small and medium-sized sellers complete small and multi-batch sales quickly, Alibaba launched AliExpress, a global e-commerce platform, in April 2010, which is called the “international version of Taobao” by sellers. Because of the rise of AliExpress, many sellers who were originally doing domestic Taobao in Zhejiang, Guangzhou, and Fujian have officially settled in the country. Among them, AliExpress’s Russian site performed particularly well. In 2018, 90% of the 290 million cross-border packages sent to Russia came from China.
Amazon again. 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 station in the United States and other sites. In 2015, the global sales revenue of Chinese seller Anker 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, Wish. Wish is a platform established in 2014, and the average daily downloads of the App are 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, mainly selling small, light and profitable products.