In 2026, China’s cross-border e-commerce is ushering in a major change.
China’s cross-border e-commerce platform, which once had the advantages of “multiple” and “provincial”, is now facing changes in its underlying logic.
Tariff compliance costs continue to rise, and the “small tax exemption” model is unsustainable. China’s cross-border e-commerce platforms must find new development directions.
Last week, Alibaba AliExpress held a closed-door meeting for Top brands overseas in Shenzhen.
AliExpress President Jing Shi clearly pointed out at the meeting that he will create a new home for Chinese brands to go overseas and become the main front for Chinese brands’ overseas digital transformation.
This marks the further strengthening of AliExpress’s strategic positioning for overseas brand expansion.
This is not the judgment of AliExpress alone.
Pinduoduo’s cross-border e-commerce Temu, which once swept the United States by “cutting one knife”, changed its approach at the shareholders’ meeting at the end of 2025, and “high quality and branding” was written into the core direction.
It has even established a self-operated brand company “Xinpinmu” and plans to invest 100 billion yuan to penetrate into the industrial belt and create its own brand.
Behind this transformation are changes in the underlying logic of the cross-border e-commerce industry.
In March 2025, Temu suddenly announced that it would move the popular products from a fully managed model to a semi-managed model, that is, to local stocking.
Behind this adjustment is a policy change. The US “$800 small exemption” policy will be officially canceled in 2025.
This policy can be said to be the lifeline for China’s cross-border direct parcel shipments to enter overseas markets with extremely low logistics costs and high customs clearance efficiency.
The distribution scale of 200 million SKUs of Chinese products, combined with the zero tariff brought by the “small exemption” policy, has formed a common moat for the platform and sellers.
Benefiting from this policy, the “Four Little Dragons” (Temu, TikTok Shop, SHEIN, and AliExpress) taking advantage of the situation have experienced substantial growth. The fully managed model that maximizes the advantages of the supply chain once became popular in the cross-border circle.
However, after enjoying the dividends of globalization and efficiency for many years, the industry has encountered such strong headwinds for the first time.
After the cancellation of this policy, Temu entered a “low-key period” in the US market, and SHEIN also took advantage of the trend to tighten advertising expenditures.
In addition to the United States, the European Union will also officially abolish its long-standing tariff exemption policy for small packages worth less than 150 euros in July.
The logic of going overseas is changing.
In the view of industry insiders, China’s cross-border e-commerce’s “multiple” advantage is being undermined by compliance costs – no platform can complete compliance declarations and tariff processing for 200 million SKUs one by one; the “provincial” advantage also faces challenges – the comprehensive cost of goods export is rising rapidly, and the original price competitiveness is greatly compressed.
Jingshi made a judgment at the meeting that this year is the middle year for China’s cross-border e-commerce from the past ten years to the next ten years.
“Facing the next ten years, iterations of user experience, changes in tariffs and compliance country-to-country transaction models are all driving a very drastic change in cross-border e-commerce.”
He mentioned several trends.
First, business localization has become an irreversible global trend.
Enterprises need to fully localize their products, inventory, supply chain fulfillment and user operations.
Second, the concentration of products and merchants will increase dramatically.
Driven by compliance, tariffs and other factors, the entry threshold for cross-border e-commerce continues to rise, traffic costs are also growing rapidly, and the supply side will usher in a major integration.
Third, branding on the supply side.
When “more” and “saving” cannot continue to work, “good” and “fast” become increasingly important.
Therefore, branding will become the core theme of cross-border e-commerce in the next ten years.
When industry giants realized that the logic of “selling goods” was unsustainable and branding became the key to breaking the situation, strategic adjustments gradually became clear.
In 2025, AliExpress will vigorously increase the number of brands, directly benchmark Amazon, the industry benchmark, launch the “Super Brand Overseas Plan”, and launch a value proposition of “bringing new increments to the brand at half the cost of Amazon.”
The infrastructure layout of AliExpress in the past year is also based on this logic.
On the fulfillment side, AliExpress has completed platform warehouse distribution coverage in 27 countries, achieving next-day delivery in core cities such as Madrid, Spain. The fulfillment cost is controlled at about half of Amazon. The goal is to “achieve 80% user experience at 50% cost.”
On the marketing side, AliExpress has built a brand marketing IP matrix such as Super Brand Day and Super New Product Day. At the same time, it has built an overseas Internet celebrity network of more than 10,000 people and 500,000 alliance sites outside the terminal.
Pinduoduo’s Temu is also actively transforming.
At the shareholders’ meeting at the end of 2025, Temu changed its caliber, and “high quality and branding” was written into the core direction.
Subsequently, Pinduoduo established its own brand company “Xinpinmu”, planning to invest 100 billion yuan to go deep into the industrial belt and build its own brand starting from raw materials and accessories.
In addition, content e-commerce TikTok Shop is also actively promoting branding.
In 2025, it launched support plans for brand merchants in multiple markets, including traffic tilt, commission discounts, brand protection, etc.
At the same time, TikTok is strengthening the construction of its mall scene, trying to establish a more traditional shelf-style e-commerce scene in addition to content-driven content, to provide brands with more stable daily sales channels.
The reason why the brand shift can be established is that there is a deeper premise: the power of products made in China has undergone structural changes.
In the past, Chinese companies going overseas generally followed the OEM mentality—making products for international brands and earning processing fees.
Even if you carry out cross-border e-commerce on your own, the basic logic is to “sell domestic products with high cost performance overseas”, and the core competitiveness is still supply chain efficiency and price advantage.
But what has changed in the past two years is that products with high unit prices and high technology content are becoming new growth points for cross-border platforms. A group of Chinese companies have accumulated technology and product capabilities and are beginning to have the ability to support brand premiums.
Of course, the challenges of brand transformation are also significant.
Brand building is a long-term investment that requires time and continuous resource support.
Overseas consumers still have cognitive inertia towards Chinese brands, and localized operations are far more complex than simply cross-border sales. Overseas e-commerce platforms such as Amazon will not sit back and watch the loss of market share, and their first-mover advantage in the brand ecosystem remains solid.
However, compared with overseas e-commerce platforms, Chinese platforms will provide more significant support to brand sellers.
A Nielsen report shows that in the new launch scenarios that overseas companies are concerned about, China’s overseas platforms have given more targeted support policies. Under the influence of policies, the overseas companies surveyed have also made specialized and scenario-based resource allocations for their inventory in the context of new product releases.
The report shows that 96% of the companies surveyed currently believe that China’s cross-border e-commerce platform is more attractive.
On the one hand, because the traffic cost of traditional platforms remains high and the marginal cost of customer acquisition is still rising, first-mover brands have also formed an advantage in category resources, and the growth of some brands has encountered bottlenecks; on the other hand, 43% of brands have actively increased their platform presence in order to eliminate the uncertainty of a single platform, and obtaining dividend support from new platforms and new policies are also influencing factors that cannot be ignored.
As for how much growth the branding of each platform can bring, the answer is still unclear.
But the turn is certain.
“Only by building a brand can we transcend the economic cycle, get rid of the low-end production model, and turn to solutions that create more consumer demand and higher profits.” Yanzhi, head of AliExpress’s overseas brand business, said, “I believe that a number of new Chinese brands will grow in the next ten years.” This is not an easy change, but the platform and merchants have no retreat.
The only way to go is up.
