AliExpress

AliExpress (Chinese: 全球速卖通) is an online retail service based in China and owned by the Alibaba Group. Launched in 2010, it is made up of small businesses in China and other locations, such as Singapore, that offer products to international online buyers. It was the most visited e-commerce website in Russia and was the 10th most popular website in Brazil. It facilitates small businesses to sell to customers all over the world. AliExpress has drawn comparison to eBay, as sellers are independent and use the platform to offer products to buyers. As of March 2024, the number of global users of the AliExpress mobile app reached 8.18 million, a 130% year-on-year increase, setting the highest record since statistics began in 2016.
AliExpress started as a business-to-business buying and selling portal. It has since expanded to include business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, cloud computing and payment services. As of 2016 AliExpress ran websites in English, Spanish, Korean, Dutch, French, Italian, German, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai and other languages - English being the default offered to those countries with languages outside the preceding list. AliExpress is known for its affordable pricing and international shipping, but buyers are advised to check seller ratings and reviews to ensure product quality and reliability.
Sellers on AliExpress can be either companies or individual industrial and commercial households. AliExpress is different from Amazon because it acts only as an e-commerce platform and does not itself sell products directly to consumers.
Since 2013, AliExpress has transitioned fully from small-scale wholesale to a To-C (consumer-oriented) platform. During this phase, the platform invested heavily in recruiting Chinese brands and focused on localized efforts in key markets such as Russia, aiming to enhance e-commerce infrastructure capabilities like logistics and payment systems. With the support of AliExpress, the delivery time of Russian postal services was reduced from several weeks to as fast as 5-7 days.
On September 25th, 2024, AliExpress Korea Held a forum conference in the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas, in Gangnam, South Korea, Introducing various programs aimed at helping local Korean sellers to expand internationally through AliExpress, including benefits such as no fees & seller deposits for five years for Korean sellers on AliExpress.
In November 2020, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology banned the AliExpress mobile phone app along with 42 other Chinese apps.
In 2022, the Office of the United States Trade Representative added AliExpress to its list of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
In November 2023, the European Commission opened a probe into AliExpress regarding "potential dissemination of illegal products such as fake medicines, non-compliant food, and ineffective dietary supplements." On the nature of the investigation, an EU official said, "We have not found yet at this stage that AliExpress is not compliant. We are simply suspecting we have elements that they are not compliant with. This is not a finding of a breach".