AliExpress sells almost nothing itself, yet it cut Russian parcel waits to days
Alibaba's consumer marketplace does not stock goods. Independent Chinese shops, plus sellers in places like Singapore, list single items for shoppers abroad, more like eBay than Amazon. Pushing into Russia, the platform helped shrink postal delivery there from several weeks to as little as five to seven days.
Launched in 2010, AliExpress was the retail sibling of Alibaba.com. Where the older site connects businesses with other businesses, this one lets an individual order a single phone case or jacket at something close to wholesale price. Sellers range from companies to small family-run commercial households, and the platform takes no role as a merchant. It later grew into consumer-to-consumer trading, payments and cloud services, and by 2016 it ran sites in more than a dozen languages, from Polish and Turkish to Thai and Vietnamese.
From 2013 it abandoned small-scale wholesale entirely to focus on ordinary shoppers, recruiting Chinese brands and investing in logistics and payments in key markets. Russia was the showcase: it became that country's most visited shopping site, and it ranked tenth among all websites in Brazil. Speed became a weapon against rival Temu. Sister company Cainiao runs a Global 5-Day Delivery programme built on dedicated hubs, reserved air cargo space and faster last-mile handling, and in 2025 it announced expansion to Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Hungary, Austria and Qatar. In South Korea, a September 2024 event in Seoul offered local sellers five years without fees or deposits.
Growth has attracted scrutiny. India banned the app in November 2020 along with 42 other Chinese applications. American trade officials put the marketplace on their list of notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy in 2022. The European Commission opened a probe in November 2023 into possible sales of fake medicines and non-compliant food, then another in March 2024 under the Digital Services Act. In July 2026 it fined the company 550 million euros for failing to manage risks around unsafe and counterfeit goods.
None of that halted demand. Global users of the mobile app reached 8.18 million as of March 2024, up 130 per cent in a year, the highest level since record-keeping began in 2016.
Source: AliExpress
