Pressure lies outside, but so do opportunities.

In April this year, AliExpress hosted a closed-door meeting in Shenzhen.

Ninety-nine brands attended, including Unitree, Dreame, Li-Ning, Xtep, Xiaomi, and Pop Mart—whose combined overseas sales have surpassed RMB 1 trillion. AliExpress President Jing Shi stated at the meeting that the platform aims to "transition from a sales channel for goods to an infrastructure for brand growth."

When an e-commerce platform says it is no longer just about "selling goods," it’s worth pondering for a moment.

Less than a month after the closed-door meeting, Alibaba released its Q4 financial report for FY2026. This time, the adjusted EBITA loss for Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group (AIDC) narrowed to RMB 138 million. This compares to a loss of RMB 3.574 billion in the same period last year and a total international business loss of RMB 15.1 billion for the entire FY2025. Over the past year, losses have shrunk significantly.

Alibaba International operates multiple business lines, including AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol, Daraz, and Miravia... but the financial report explicitly highlighted who is driving this turnaround: "The unit economics of AliExpress' Choice business continued to improve quarter-over-quarter," and "The quarterly active buyer penetration rate of the Brand+ Program exceeded 30%."

This is almost saying that AliExpress' choices are rewriting Alibaba International's profit formula. In fact, over the past few months, AliExpress has been highly active, but it’s hard to sum up in a sentence or two what exactly it’s doing. A more accurate summary (summary) might be: After the underlying logic of cross-border e-commerce has been rewritten, AliExpress is betting on a path quite different from Temu and SHEIN.

I tried to dissect from the financial data and industry trends over the past year what AliExpress is doing right and what future it’s betting on.

01

8% Market Share

And a Path No Longer Reliant on "Low Prices"

Let’s start with an unavoidable number.

The International Post Corporation’s (IPC) 2025 Cross-Border E-Commerce Consumer Survey, covering 37 countries and over 31,000 frequent cross-border online shoppers, found that Temu tied with Amazon at 24% global cross-border market share, SHEIN held steady at 9%, and AliExpress stood at 8%—down one percentage point from 9% in 2024.

8% is not an inspiring figure. Stretching the timeline further, AliExpress once held a 15% market share in 2021—nearly halved compared to now.

But that’s only one side of the story. On the flip side: AliExpress reached 646 million monthly visits in 2025, ranking third globally among e-commerce platforms, behind only Amazon and Temu. On the first day of Black Friday 2025, its app downloads in Europe surpassed Amazon’s. In the first half of 2025, the number of newly settle in brands on the platform grew by over 70% year-over-year.

A platform with declining market share but surging brand inflows—this contradiction is intriguing. If we go back two years, AliExpress’ strategy was similar to its peers: low-priced inventory, full consignment, leveraging China’s supply chain efficiency to slash prices. But by 2025, the industry’s underlying logic began to shift piece by piece.

Specifically, from 2023 to 2024, AliExpress fully rolled out Choice—an upgraded "full consignment" fulfillment system where merchants hand over goods to the platform, which handles pricing, sales, logistics, and after-sales. The idea was straightforward: use platform-controlled inventory to lower front-end prices, capturing users and market share.

But the trade-offs were clear. Ultra-low pricing required platform subsidies, upfront warehousing and fulfillment costs, plus investments in user experience improvements—the larger the scale, the greater the losses. Many industry insiders predicted then that Alibaba International’s losses would persist for at least another three to five years.

The turning point came in 2025. The U.S. officially abolished tariff exemptions for small parcels under $800 (T86). The EU tightened exemptions for parcels under €150, while Malaysia, Thailand, Chile, and other nations adjusted tax policies for small imports.

Policy changes hit faster than the industry expected. T86 saw cancellation, temporary restoration, and wild swings in tax rates between 120% and 54% in the first half of 2025 before being fully shut down. Under the new rules, direct mail parcels under $800 face tariffs of "30% of value or $25 per item."

For the past decade, China’s cross-border e-commerce had relied on two core advantages: "variety" (SKU expansion) and "savings" (zero tariffs via small-parcel exemptions). Now both cards were being revoked. At the closed-door meeting, Jing Shi judged that 2026 marks a "transitional year" for China’s cross-border e-commerce—moving from the past decade to the next—as the industry undergoes "extremely intense changes."

Against this backdrop, the paths of major platforms began to diverge sharply.

02

Three Distinct Paths

At Pinduoduo’s (Temu’s parent company) 2025 annual shareholder meeting, "high-quality branding" was enshrined as a core direction. The company established a self-operated brand arm, "Xinpinmu," planning to invest RMB 100 billion to intervene (intervene) in product definition at the industrial belt’s raw material stage—building brands from scratch. This is a top-down approach extending from manufacturing.

JD’s Joybuy took a different route: fully self-operated, excluding third-party sellers, acquiring German retail giant Ceconomy for offline stores and supply chain resources, and leveraging its self-built logistics network, JoyExpress, to achieve same-day or next-day delivery in core European cities. Essentially, it’s replicating a JD-style local retailer overseas.

AliExpress’ strategy falls between the two but leans more toward "platform empowerment" than "self-operated control." What it aims to do is transplant Tmall’s domestic brand operation methodology—new product launches, fan engagement, marketing IPs, data tools—overseas, providing go overseas brands with a systematic growth toolkit.

AliExpress no longer indiscriminately pursues order volume. Since last year, the platform has visibly tightened subsidy rhythms, abandoning head-on price wars with Temu and SHEIN. Instead, it concentrates resources on higher-ASP, lower-return-rate, and more predictable repurchase categories.

"The unit economics of Choice continue to improve quarter-over-quarter"—in plain terms, losses per order are shrinking, with some orders already turning profitable.

If Choice represents AliExpress’ "cost-saving" move, then Brand+ is its "revenue-generating" play. The Super Brand Global Launch Program aims to deliver all-new growth for brands at roughly half Amazon’s cost.

What does "half the cost" mean? Sellers calculate: category commissions are 10 percentage points lower than Amazon’s, operational manpower is less than half, and after-sales rates are lower too.

To date, over 50 brands have joined Brand+, including Unitree, Dreame, Li-Ning, Xtep, Honor, Baseus, Nubia, Xiaomi, Pop Mart, Anker Robotics, and Rokid—primarily in high-value categories like consumer electronics, smart hardware, and smart appliances.

Moreover, brands bring their own traffic. A Li-Ning or Xiaomi store launching on AliExpress doesn’t require the platform to burn money on acquisition—fan bases and social media discussions naturally drive traffic. This explains how buyer activity and purchase frequency remain sustained even as subsidies narrow.

Data-wise, brand GMV on the platform grew over 40% year-over-year in the past year, with the number of brands exceeding $10 million in annual sales rising by 64%. Over 300 brands saw 200% growth. A survey by a cross-border service agency found that most Amazon sellers plan to use AliExpress as their second growth engine for brand expansion.

AliExpress’ 2026 goal: Help 2,000 Chinese brands double their overseas scale.

03

Who Gets Eliminated, Who Gets In

Branding isn’t just a slogan. Platform rules are tightening to align with this direction.

Last April, AliExpress fully closed individual seller registration, accepting only corporate entities (excluding individual businesses) requiring business licenses, legal identity proofs, and corporate bank accounts. It also launched a five-tier merchant grading system (S/A/B/C/N), primarily evaluating GMV, service scores, and logistics timeliness.

This is clearly a screening process. With higher barriers, the remaining players are mainly two types: mature merchants with brand premium capabilities and factory-type sellers with stable supply capacities—both more risk-resistant, rule-compliant, and professional.

Early this year, the platform issued new rules for light, small items under $10: In semi-consignment countries, these must adopt semi-consignment mode and cannot exit for 180 days. It simultaneously rolled out a "POP + Full Consignment" dual-track system: Cross-border inventory uses POP or full consignment; local inventory uses overseas consignment.

Overseas consignment is a key focus for AliExpress. It requires merchants to ship from their own overseas warehouses, with the platform handling sales and fulfillment. For bulky items and fast-fulfillment categories, this model bypasses direct mail tariff impacts. Logistics infrastructure is also scaling up, with warehousing networks covering 27 key countries and next-day delivery in multiple nations’ core cities.

As logistics mainlines are scaled and "overseas warehouse pre-stocking + local delivery" gradually replaces "cross-border small-parcel direct mail," average fulfillment costs are declining. This model, in turn, optimizes user experience, creating a virtuous cycle.

With overseas warehouse shipping, consumers receive goods in two to three days or even next-day, with faster returns processing. This has significantly boosted AliExpress’ NPS (Net Promoter Score) in some European countries. When delivery experiences rival local e-commerce platforms, branding gains a true experiential foundation—you can’t make customers wait two weeks for Li-Ning shoes.

The logic of branding is sound. Costs rise, so higher premiums are needed to sustain the business model. But logic is one thing; execution is another.

In global cross-border market share rankings, AliExpress lags far behind Temu, though these figures are calculated by order volume, not transaction value. Chinese platforms’ focus on low-priced, small items means ASP gaps persist.

How far AliExpress’ branding can go depends on several tangible variables: its ability to continuously attract top brands and achieve scalable growth, whether overseas consignment can gain logistics cost and timeliness advantages in more markets, and whether GDPR and product compliance regulations can be digested by both platforms and merchants.

AliExpress just launched a "Product Compliance Center" this year, using AI guidance and digital dashboards to assist merchants with qualification (qualification) and labeling compliance—a pragmatic but time-intensive move.

A notable point: At the closed-door meeting, AliExpress President Jing Shi spoke of "three irreversibles": Irreversible localization of operations, irreversible consolidation of merchants, and irreversible supply-side branding. If these judgments hold, AliExpress’ current efforts aren’t just short-term tactical shifts—they’re laying tracks for the next decade.

But laying tracks takes time, and time isn’t always on the side of transformers.

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