AliExpress

, 2016 AliExpress started as a business-to-consumer buying and selling portal. Aliexpress is a subsidary of Alibaba Group, but unlike its sister organization Alibaba.com, it is not a business to business entity but a business to customer platform that sells different products to customers worldwide where they can purchase single piece items. In 2010 the platform went live and offers electronics, clothing, home goods at wholesale pricing. 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, Chinese, 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. 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. In 2025, United States president Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14256 to end the de minimis exemption for all products from China on May 2. The exception had allowed low cost goods under $800 to be imported without any custom duties or tariffs. As a result of this change, there was expected disruption in the business models of retailers such as AliExpress. == Abroad ==

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 25 September 2024, AliExpress Korea held a 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 and seller deposits for five years for Korean sellers on AliExpress. In 2025, Cainiao, a logistics company also owned by the Alibaba Group, announced it would extend "Global 5-Day Delivery" to six additional markets—Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Hungary, Austria, and Qatar—with rollout completion targeted by the end of 2025. AliExpress announced that it will offer five-day delivery for customers in the United States in 2024, as they battle with fellow organization Temu. AliExpress first offered international delivery to countries like Germany, France, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico in 2023. This coincided with Temu which has also expanded into the US market. Alibaba's e-commerce site and Temu are presently two of the most valuable Chinese firms on the U.S. stock exchange. PDD which owns Temu, overtook Alibaba's market cap in the fourth quarter of 2023 but lost the top spot to Alibaba in the first quarter, according to LSEG data. Global 5-Day Delivery is Cainiao's logistics program that targets international delivery in roughly five days for eligible lanes, leveraging dedicated hubs, secured air capacity, and accelerated last-mile processes. ==Government responses==

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". == References ==