If you want to sum up China’s cross-border e-commerce in 2025 in one word, “change” is undoubtedly the most appropriate answer.
Today, consumers around the world no longer ask “Which country is this product from?” but only care about “can it be delivered tomorrow” and “do you understand what I need?” Cross-border e-commerce is no longer a branch of trade, but the heartbeat of new globalization.
Cross-border e-commerce, which once relied on “low-price direct mail + tax-free dividends” to grow wildly, is being forced to bid farewell to the extensive era and enter a systemic competition centered on supply chain resilience, localized operations and AI intelligence drive.
In this still deep but magnificent industry reshuffle, cross-border e-commerce has fully shifted from “sales logic” to “global brand operation logic”.
This year, SHEIN has been at the forefront of global fast fashion with its flexible supply chain of “small orders and quick turnaround”; TEMU has expanded strongly in Europe and Latin America by leveraging the two-wheel drive of fully managed and semi-managed products; AliExpress has relied on Alibaba Ecosystem and Cainiao Logistics to deeply explore emerging markets and accelerate its transformation from a platform to a comprehensive overseas service provider.
Some new phenomena are also emerging.
For example, new players have joined the cross-border e-commerce war – Xiaohongshu and JD.com are belatedly arriving; for example, the door to AI e-commerce is gradually opening – ChatGPT shopping has become a reality, and GEO has become one of the hot words that brands pay the most attention to.
The surge in 2025 is not the end, but the real starting point for Chinese brands to move from “selling out” to “going in” – the world’s shelves have no boundaries.
Platform rules “big change”
In 2025, although the cross-border e-commerce “Four Little Dragons” encountered multiple challenges such as tariffs and compliance, they still achieved significant growth overall. Among them, the GMV of TikTok and TEMU approached US$100 billion for the first time.
TEMU’s full-year 2025 GMV is expected to be between $90 billion and $95 billion (previous target was $100 billion).
In addition, TEMU has continuously topped the global e-commerce download and monthly active growth charts for the past three years. As of October 2025, TEMU’s global cumulative downloads have exceeded 1.2 billion times. In August 2025, the number of global monthly active users reached 530 million, a record high.
This outbreak is not accidental, but comes from the in-depth adjustment of platform rules. The relationship between the platform and sellers is being reconstructed, from “full control” to “collaboration.”
The three major leading platforms – TEMU, SHEIN and AliExpress have simultaneously completed the strategic paradigm switch: from “fully managed traffic harvesting” to a refined operating model of “semi-managed + overseas warehouse + brand co-building”.
AliExpress has the most radical transformation. Its “Super Brand Overseas Plan” targets a group of leading brands, including cross-border sales, well-known domestic brands, etc., and helps brands create new increments at half the cost of Amazon.
The effects are also immediate: In the first half of 2025, the number of new brands entering the AliExpress platform increased by 72% year-on-year, more than 500 brands doubled their sales, and more than 2,000 brands opened up new overseas markets through AliExpress.
SHEIN accelerates the two-wheel drive of “platformization + branding”.
SHEIN focuses more on the core of “fashion” and continues to break through the ceiling of self-operation through platform strategy.
Through the Xcelerator brand incubation program launched in 2025, SHEIN has begun to open its supply chain infrastructure and traffic pool that have been cultivated for many years to a wider range of third-party brands and designers.
TEMU focuses on semi-managed and regional deepening.
Last year, TEMU quickly moved the battlefield to markets such as Europe and Latin America through cost-effectiveness and semi-managed models.
In Poland and Germany, TEMU’s self-built local warehousing system allows “Yiwu Small Commodities” to achieve Amazon-like timeliness; in the Latin American market, TEMU’s traffic share once surged to 15.98%, even surpassing the local giant Mercado Libre.
In North America, TEMU no longer relies solely on direct supply from China, but has officially promoted a recruitment plan for local sellers in Canada, trying to buffer logistics and policy risks through local supply.
Rapid growth under global retail 2.0
2025
The rapid development of cross-border e-commerce in 2016 is often misinterpreted as short-term arbitrage or policy dividends.
In fact, this is a new stage in which global retail has entered a new stage of “borderless, instant gratification, and high personalization”.
This is not a bubble, but the real implementation of digital globalization on the consumer side – consumers no longer distinguish between “domestic” and “overseas”, and only care about “whether it is delivered quickly” and “whether it accurately matches needs.”
China’s production capacity has not yet been fully released.
According to data from 1688, there are more than 10 million e-commerce sellers nationwide and more than 1 million cross-border sellers, which is about 10 times the difference.
However, only 30% of 1688 merchants are doing cross-border transactions.
According to Alibaba’s predictions, this figure may rise 2-3 times in the future.
Due to the influence of policies in the North American market, Chinese businesses have already turned their attention to Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and other places, especially after the US New Deal.
After the New Deal, a 3C seller who has been working on Amazon’s US site for 8 years made a calculation to the media: Taking an ordinary computer keyboard as an example, tariffs alone have increased the hard cost by about US$20.
In the field of consumer electronics, where profits are already transparent, this has almost wiped out all the price advantages of the product.
As a result, more and more businesses are looking for alternative markets.
Many sellers have begun to choose to shift their focus to the European market.
During the survey, they found that European consumers have relatively high demand for high-quality 3C products, and price competition is not as fierce as in the U.S. market.
The above-mentioned seller said that the current sales base in Europe is still far less than that in the United States, but the growth trend is very healthy, and the average monthly sales growth rate remains above 25%.
More importantly, there is no such serious price war in the European market, and the average profit margin continues to rise, and may surpass the United States in the future.
This trend has also received positive response from leading cross-border e-commerce platforms.
SHEIN, TEMU and AliExpress, the three main players in China’s overseas market, are accelerating the expansion of European and other emerging markets with different strategies to build a diversified global sales network.
Structural growth begins: The track is booming vs. the model is ebbing
In 2026, cross-border e-commerce will bid farewell to the “general rise era” and fully enter the stage of structural differentiation: some tracks are soaring because they are in line with the new consumption logic, while some old models are accelerating their ebb due to their inability to adapt to compliance and value requirements.
Growth no longer flows equally, but flows accurately to those companies that truly have “localized genes” and “brand core” – whoever can build a closed loop between compliance, experience and repurchase will have the ticket to the next stage.
This differentiation is first reflected in the strong rise of DTC brands with high repurchase and strong design sense.
Relying on the semi-managed ecosystem of SHEIN and AliExpress, Chinese DTC brands with original design capabilities are rising rapidly.
At the same time, the compliance-first European 3C category is becoming a new blue ocean.
Looking at the other end, two types of old models are being cleared at an accelerated pace.
The first is a “pure low-priced direct mail white label”; the second is a “full custody dependency without local performance capabilities.”
In 2026, the winner of cross-border e-commerce will be clear: it is not who runs fast, but who penetrates deep.
Only companies that integrate product capabilities, compliance capabilities and localized operations can continue to lead in structural growth.
This evolution from “casting a wide net” to “intensive farming” is reshaping the underlying logic of Chinese brand globalization.
