Chinese e-Commerce outlets keen to make inroads abroad prefer to sell on Amazon than homegrown platforms, a new survey of more than 900 Chinese e-commerce sellers has found.
Of the major sellers, 62 per cent said they sell on Amazon, compared to 45 per cent on Wish, and 40 per cent on AliExpress, a division of Alibaba. Ebay, Lazada, and JD.com all accounted for smaller portions of the pie.
The survey, conducted by Payoneer, a B2B online payments company, found that of the respondents who preferred Amazon, they felt the retailer to be trustworthy and favored its emphasis on quality products and simple and fair rules.
SEE ALSO: Mobile and internet usage propels Southeast Asia’s retail Ecommerce sector
Despite China‘s economy showing sustained signs of weakness, its e-commerce industry continues to surge. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, Chinese retail websites sold nearly US$590 billion worth of goods last year, an increase of 33 per cent from the year before. Meanwhile, eMarketer predicts China will account for 40 per cent of the world’s retail e-commerce sales this year, an increase from 35 per cent.
“The ‘brand’ matters less,” Scott Galit, CEO of Payoneer says. “Now the consumer is just shopping for what they want: the description, the review, not the brand.”
“Instead of going through a brand or intermediary, they’re able to leverage this marketplace as a new intermediary,” Galit said “A very powerful way to get into marketplaces around the world that otherwise would have been possible.”
While opportunities have increased, close to half of the respondents cited an increasing number of fellow Chinese sellers as the biggest challenge to selling online.
This competition could be what’s driving more sellers to use multiple marketplaces. “There’s very much a growing opportunity and adding additional marketplaces is helping growth,” Galit added, noting the more marketplaces a manufacturer sold on, the larger their volume tended to be.
(Source: South China Morning Post)