Alibaba is growing rapidly in Europe and has surpassed Amazon in some areas

Alibaba ranked among the top three online sellers of consumer goods in Eastern Europe last year, while Amazon was not among the top ten in the region, according to Euromonitor International.

Amazon leads in sales in Western Europe, such as France and Spain, but its market share in Eastern Europe has not grown during the outbreak, remaining at around 19.3% in 2020. In contrast , Alibaba's market share rose from 2% in 2019 to 2.9% in 2020.

According to Euromonitor, Alibaba took the top spot in the Eastern European e-commerce market in 2019. But during the 2020 pandemic, Polish online shopping site Allegro ranked first, while Russian competitor Wildberries ranked second, causing Alibaba to fall to third place last year.

In recent years, Alibaba has been promoting shopping festivals overseas and selling goods overseas through its e-commerce platform AliExpress, which mainly connects Chinese sellers and overseas buyers, allowing foreign companies and consumers to buy goods directly from Chinese factories.

According to Li Dawei, head of AliExpress's supply chain, Spain, Russia, Brazil and other places are the core countries for AliExpress's overseas expansion.

In addition, Alibaba plans to double its international logistics subsidies for Singles’ Day this year, a decrease from the company’s announcement that it spent five times as much on subsidies last year as it did in 2019.

AliExpress said it has not increased costs for customers during a period of global shipping congestion, nor has it experienced any major delivery delays due to its reliance on charter flights. And most of the items sold through the AliExpress platform are small items that do not need to be shipped by ship.

According to it, during the Singles' Day period, the number of overseas charter flights per week will increase to 100 flights between November 11 and 30, up from the previous 80 flights per week. After leaving China, these packages can be distributed at Cainiao's international logistics sorting centers, six of which are in Europe and one in Russia.

At the same time, Alibaba has also increased its investment in parcel lockers for the global shopping festival, which allows couriers to deliver multiple packages to residents in a community at the same time.

Li Dawei mentioned that AliExpress not only hopes to sell products to European consumers, but also hopes that local merchants can settle in its AliExpress platform. The platform will provide merchants with a variety of subsidies to help them develop better.

AliExpress Platform

Cross-border e-commerce companies

Alibaba