“AI is rewriting the growth logic of cross-border e-commerce.” Qiu Sheng, vice president of Amazon China and head of Amazon Global Store Asia Pacific market and business development, said.
On June 11, Amazon Global Store released the “2026 China Export Cross-Border E-commerce Development Trend White Paper”.
This global e-commerce platform, which has just topped the latest Fortune 500 list, believes that the structural opportunity of “AI-driven cross-border e-commerce globalization” has arrived.
Qiu Sheng observed that the current “AI-driven cross-border e-commerce globalization” has become a new paradigm for going overseas.
AI not only improves sellers’ efficiency in product selection, content, consumer insights, marketing, compliance, customer service, etc., it also accelerates sellers’ move from single-country operations to global layout, giving rise to innovations in data-based decision-making, global business opportunity detection, one-stop risk control and other fields.
In the past, sellers went overseas by “expanding site by site”—registering an account, selecting products on a single site, manually creating listings, and operating a single site. It was a linear and gradual accumulation process.
Now, entering the era of “next generation cross-border chain”, AI empowers the entire overseas link.
From AI assistants to assist in store opening, AI-driven business opportunity detectors to assist in identifying global sales opportunities, to AI to create multi-language listings and content localization, combined with Amazon’s global intelligent hub warehouse GWD and AI-based advertising, customer service and operational optimization capabilities, these innovations allow sellers to build a global business layout from the first day.
Amazon Global Stores summarizes five major trends in the application of AI in the cross-border e-commerce industry.
The first is to use AI to promote operational automation.
The application of AI by leading cross-border e-commerce companies is evolving from single-point tools to agents capable of autonomous reasoning, planning and action, and even to operating systems with multi-agent interaction and collaboration.
Amazon research shows that more than 98% of Chinese sellers surveyed are already using AI tools when operating Amazon stores, and 16% of them have advanced from single-point AI tools to deploying AI workflows or agents to automatically perform multi-tasking.
Take the cross-border beauty brand MelodySusie as an example. The brand combined AI agents with the Amazon Advertising API to build a full-link advertising automated agent system, achieving more than 90% of operational execution automation. While driving substantial growth in revenue, the advertising input-output ratio (ACOS) was only 1/3 of the industry level, and the conversion rate increased by nearly 40%.
The second is to use AI to upgrade decision-making intelligence.
Faced with complex decisions in various operations such as pricing, product selection, and replenishment, AI is helping sellers turn judgments that relied heavily on personal experience or hard-to-interpret big data in the past into scientific decisions that are quantifiable and verifiable.
It is understood that in 2025, the number of monthly users of Amazon’s seller assistant function introduced by Agentic AI will exceed 230,000, and the adoption rate of sellers’ suggestions will exceed 90%.
The third is to use AI to drive product innovation.
AI is opening up another possibility for product innovation, shifting from the traditional product selection logic of “picking what sells well” to discovering “unmet needs” and then defining and developing new categories.
Amazon found that there are three application paths: using AI to discover hidden gaps in mature categories, integrating AI functions into products to redefine category capabilities, and creating new consumer categories native to the AI era.
The fourth is to use AI to release growth efficiency.
The penetration of AI in the cross-border e-commerce business chain continues to increase. From the initial stage of partial application of AI in listing, advertising and other links, it has begun to move towards a comprehensive AI layout in key links such as product selection, content, consumer insights, marketing, compliance, customer service, etc., forming a cross-linkage performance system to improve the quality and efficiency of every step of operations.
For example, GameSir, a gaming peripheral brand, has doubled the number of covered sites and reduced costs by 40% through the multi-line parallelization of AI tools.
The Amazon store of underwear brand ubras is managed by only two people, achieving the operational scale of a traditional 10-person team.
The “one-person company” Xingwei Technology has developed a replicable AI product development workflow and has the operational capabilities of a complete brand team from strategy to execution.
“Full-link AI empowerment has evened the gap in operational capabilities and efficiency, creating the possibility for the explosive development of small and medium-sized enterprises and small teams.” Amazon said.
The fifth is to use AI to reconstruct security boundaries.
The sustainability of cross-border e-commerce business growth depends largely on the seller’s robust compliance operations.
AI is transforming compliance risk control from “post-event remediation” to “pre-emptive prevention”: automatic monitoring around the clock, predicting risks in advance, and automatically generating response plans, providing more protection for global operations.
“These trends do not occur in isolation, but are interconnected and accelerating each other,” Amazon said.
From operational automation and intelligent decision-making to product innovation, efficiency improvement and proactive risk control, AI is reshaping the development path of export cross-border e-commerce with unprecedented depth and breadth.
