In the spring of 2026, China’s cross-border e-commerce industry ushered in a strategic turning point.
On March 16, JD.com officially launched the online retail brand Joybuy in Europe, bringing the “211” limited-time delivery service to more than 30 major European cities.
Just nine days later, Pinduoduo announced the establishment of “New Pinmu”, with an initial investment of 15 billion yuan and plans to spend 100 billion yuan within three years to build a self-operated brand.
On April 15, AliExpress held a closed-door brand meeting in Shenzhen and announced that it would help 2,000 Chinese brands double their overseas scale by 2026.
Within a month, three Chinese e-commerce giants almost simultaneously showed the “branding” card.
This is not an accidental collision, but a strategic transformation that has been brewing for a long time – they are not willing to just be a “porter” of goods, but to build their own brand moats in overseas markets and launch a head-on challenge to Amazon.
For a long time, Amazon’s global prosperity has relied heavily on Chinese sellers and Chinese manufacturing.
Data from research institution MarketplacePulse shows that as of September 2025, Chinese sellers accounted for 50.03% of Amazon’s global sellers; as of the end of December 2025, there were 165,000 new sellers, and Chinese new sellers accounted for 59.9%.
As of September 2025, according to statistics from e-commerce data analysis organizations such as AltIndex and RevenueGeeks, approximately 60% – 70% of the products on the Amazon platform are produced in China, and 71% of U.S. sellers rely on Chinese procurement.
Made in China not only constitutes an important source of goods for Amazon’s third-party ecosystem, but has always been the core engine of its GMV growth.
But now, it seems to be being redefined in a new way by China’s local e-commerce platforms.
The three platform companies chose to speed up on the same track, but the answers they gave were completely different.
AliExpress’s approach is most similar to Tmall’s overseas expansion.
It does not directly build a brand, but moves the entire brand operation methodology that Alibaba has accumulated in China – new product launches, fan operations, marketing IP, and data empowerment – overseas.
“Use half of Amazon’s fulfillment costs to achieve 80% fulfillment experience.” This is AliExpress’s internal quantitative goal to benchmark Amazon.
On the marketing side, AliExpress has built a matrix of more than 10,000 internet celebrities and 500,000 alliance webmaster resources covering core markets such as Europe, the United States and South Korea; on the distribution side, it will achieve warehouse distribution coverage in 27 key countries and provide next-day delivery services to core cities in 4 countries.
This model has been verified in data.
In the past year, AliExpress platform brand GMV increased by 40% year-on-year, and the number of brands with annual sales exceeding 10 million US dollars increased by 64%.
During the major promotion in March this year, the single-day turnover of Zhuimi and Li Ning in core markets both increased by more than 300% month-on-month.
JD.com chose to replicate its entire domestic model in the European market – self-operated retail, self-built logistics, and quality control.
At present, JD Logistics has operated more than 60 warehouses and express delivery sites for Joybuy in Europe, enabling same-day delivery services of “place an order in the morning and receive the goods in the afternoon” in more than 30 cities, covering a population of more than 40 million.
In July last year, JD.com also acquired European consumer electronics retailer Ceconomy for about 2.2 billion euros, acquiring more than 1,000 stores and more than 43 million members of the two major brands MediaMarkt and Saturn in 12 countries.
JD.com’s advantage lies in its localized fulfillment capabilities—a core barrier that Amazon has spent more than $100 billion building over the past two decades.
The challenge is that this asset-heavy model requires large investments and a long return cycle.
Pinduoduo’s new Pinmu is not to broker transactions, but to directly “build a brand”—intervening from the most upstream of the supply chain, integrating industrial chain factory resources, and building a self-operated brand.
“In the next three years, we will invest 100 billion yuan to fully cover the domestic industrial belt and cultivate a number of self-operated brands with different positioning and multiple categories.” Zhao Jiazhen, co-chairman of Pinduoduo, explained at the financial report meeting.
Xinpinmu is targeting the “foundation” of Amazon’s third-party ecosystem—China’s industrial belt.
In the past ten years, industrial clusters such as Shenzhen Digital, Yiwu Small Commodities, Shaodong Luggage, and Pinghu Down have not only been the source of goods for a large number of Chinese sellers on Amazon, but also the foundation for Temu (Pinduoduo’s cross-border e-commerce platform) to achieve global scale in the past three years.
Pinduoduo’s logic is: Since these factories can OEM for others, why not directly make brands for me?
The three platforms chose to increase their brand overseas in the spring of 2026, and there is a common driving force behind them.
Domestic e-commerce traffic dividends have peaked, and the profit margins of platforms and merchants have continued to be compressed.
It has become a consensus to go overseas to find deterministic increments.
In the view of AliExpress President Jing Shi, cross-border e-commerce is entering a new stage.
“In the past five years, China’s four core cross-border e-commerce platforms (Temu, TikTokShop, SHEIN, and AliExpress) have built more than 5 million square meters of warehouses around the world, increasing the average global fulfillment time from 35 days to 15 days.” He believes that when the logistics infrastructure is basically in place, the competitive logic will inevitably shift from “more and more provinces” to “better and faster”.
E-commerce practitioner Li Jie analyzed that in the post-epidemic era, the penetration rate of global e-commerce has increased, and consumer demand for cost-effective products continues to be strong.
This provides an excellent entry point for China’s supply chain to reach consumers directly.
More importantly, rising tariff costs, tighter compliance, and increased traffic costs are collectively squeezing the survival space of the traditional distribution model.
When the “low price” advantage is continuously weakened, brand premium becomes the only way to absorb costs.
Cui Lili, deputy director of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, analyzed that at the current stage, “the quality support of Made in China and the maturity of the e-commerce DTC brand operation model” have given the platform the basic conditions for transformation into a brand.
The three platforms are working hard on the brand side at the same time, and they are indeed squeezing Amazon’s space from different angles.
AliExpress is poaching leading merchants who already have brands.
Data from Nielsen’s “2026 Overseas Brand Platform Migration White Paper” released on April 13, 2026, shows that between 2024 and 2025, the overall GMV of overseas brands on Amazon will decline by 4%, while AliExpress has achieved a 4% growth.
This means that brand platform choices are shifting.
Xinpinmu intercepts the supply of the upstream industrial belt.
If Pinduoduo can successfully convert industrial factories into self-operated brands, Amazon’s “supply foundation” of third-party ecology will be affected.
JD.com Joybuy is trying to compete head-on with Amazon on local fulfillment capabilities – this is Amazon’s core barrier.
Jiang Han, a senior researcher at Pangu Think Tank, believes that the difference between the three is that “Alibaba does ‘connection’, JD does ‘experience’, and Pinduoduo does ‘supply’.”
Although they pose challenges to Amazon from different dimensions, Amazon’s moat is still deep thanks to its global smart supply chain, cloud and AI infrastructure, and two decades of accumulation of brand trust.
Cui Lili’s judgment is more cautious. She believes that in the long term, the degree of threat depends on whether the three can break through the low-price trap and establish sustainable experience or brand barriers.
Despite the attractive prospects, the road for Chinese e-commerce platform brands to go overseas is not smooth.
Tariffs and geopolitical risks are the first variable.
Li Jie reminded that China’s small commodities have long relied on the “tax avoidance” model. As countries continue to increase tariff barriers on Chinese goods, the low-cost advantage of China’s cross-border e-commerce is being eroded.
If the tariff war expands further in the future, all platforms will be under pressure.
Li Jie bluntly said that the three platforms are working independently and lack the synergy to unite to resist external pressure.
This competition model has obvious short-term advantages when facing global giants like Amazon, but the road to long-term brand upgrade and global competition is not smooth.
“The biggest criticism of many brands is that traditional marketing methods are basically price-oriented.” AliExpress President Jing Shi said at a closed-door meeting that the platform has been adjusted, but it will take time to verify it on a larger scale.
The essence of this brand battle is the strategic transition of China’s e-commerce platforms from “selling goods” to “making brands”.
The “Guiding Opinions on Better Serving the Real Economy and Promoting the High-quality Development of E-Commerce” issued by the Ministry of Commerce and six other departments in early April clearly stated that it is necessary to “encourage e-commerce companies to register trademarks overseas, apply for patents, and develop independent trademarks and brands.”
The policy level is providing institutional support for Chinese e-commerce companies to go overseas.
Zhuang Shuai, an expert in the retail e-commerce industry and founder of Bailian Consulting, pointed out that today’s e-commerce overseas has upgraded from simply selling “Made in China” to outputting “new quality productivity” solutions based on digital supply chains, AI accurate recommendations and flexible production models. It is entirely possible to “lead the global business innovation trend by defining new consumption standards of high cost performance and fast fashion.”
When compliance costs and tariff costs continue to rise, the “low price” card has come to an end.
Branding is not a multiple choice question, but a necessary path.
