Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group is overhauling the business model of its fast-growing e-commerce subsidiary, AliExpress, to enable a big new push into the international marketplace, China Daily reports.
The company is starting to allow vendors in an initial four countries overseas — Italy, Spain, Russia and Turkey — to use the AliExpress platform to sell internationally.
Until now, AliExpress has sold goods from vendors inside China to customers in more than 150 countries.
“From the very first day that Alibaba was founded we had a ‘global dream’,” Trudy Dai, president of Alibaba’s wholesale marketplaces division told the Financial Times.
Earlier this year, online Turkish retailer Trendyol launched a store on AliExpress, following Alibaba’s investment in Trendyol last year.
It was noted that as it expands its international footprint, Alibaba is employing a number of different localization strategies aimed at building up customer bases, sometimes with politically well-connected partners.
In Russia, it announced last year that AliExpress will partner with Mail.ru — potentially boosting AliExpress’ Russian customer base.
Alibaba Group is a multinational conglomerate specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet and technology. Founded in 1999, the company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals, as well as electronic payment services, shopping search engines and cloud computing services. It owns and operates a diverse array of businesses around the world in numerous sectors.
