Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has teamed up with an additional 11 countries to build their curated shopping sites or “pavilions” on Tmall Global for selling popular products and specialties from selected companies to Chinese mainland customers. The countries include the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, France, Britain, Spain, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Turkey.
Meanwhile, Alibaba also entered into partnerships with the embassies of 26 countries to improve marketing and promotion operations of their country’s products via Alibaba’s group-buying platform Juhuasuan.
In an attempt to tap the rising demand of domestic customers for international products, Alibaba launched Tmall Global, a dedicated site for overseas brands and merchants to sell goods to Chinese shoppers in February 2014. According to data released by the company, Tmall Global saw a ten-fold sales increase between February and November 2014. More than 5,400 brands from over 20 countries, including U.S. retailor Costco, were settled on the marketplace.
South Korea’s government became the first country to launch an official pavilion on Alibaba’s Tmall.com in May. The recent additions are the second batch for Tmall Global’s country pavilions, and more countries will be added to the program soon. Tmall Global has entered cooperation agreements with warehousing facilitities in the cities of Guangzhou, Zhengzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai to speed up the custom clearance process.
In recent months, Alibaba Group has been aggressively promoting the growth of cross-border online shopping with government officials and business leaders around the world. Earlier this month, Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma visited the U.S. to talk about Alibaba’s international strategy and how small businesses can use the Web to sell directly to Chinese consumers.
More and more Chinese people choose to purchase high quality and imported products online. A raft of domestic companies have flocked into the cross-border retail sector to tap the booming market.
Image credit: Souhu