China's Alibaba is overhauling the business model of AliExpress, its fast-growing ecommerce subsidiary, to enable a big new push into the international marketplace. It 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’,” president of Alibaba's wholesale marketplaces division Trudy Dai told the Financial Times.
It was noted that as it expands its international footprint, Alibaba is employing a number of different localisation 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.
