Reasons For AliExpress Popularity

AliExpress represents a well-known business-to-customer, shortly B2C, marketplace. This platform is widely used by Chinese companies and sole entrepreneurs for selling their products to people around the world.

Does it sound to be too simple to explain such a success of AliExpress? Clearly, there must be something special about it to justify its popularity. We’d like to draw your attention to a few points below:

• A broad variety of Aliexpress goods is really impressive. It’s pretty impossible NOT to find what you need there, no matter if it’s about electronics, cosmetics, homeware, or something else. It’s all there, believe us.
• As a Chinese venture, the headquarter is situated in Hangzhou. Have you ever been there? That office is truly gorgeous. It has different specialized areas for the staff, say, relaxation, gym, cafe, and more. So, it’s a real treat to be a part of the AliExpress team. Happy people work more effectively, that’s a fact. In case you’re serious about building a two-sided marketplace, you might want to take the AliExpress strategy as an example.
• You can find the AliExpress pick-up points throughout the world, which gives the company a valuable competitive advantage.

Essentially, the platform is oriented to a typical European purchaser. It’s a pretty critical issue to be aware of since Chinese customers have different shopping preferences. Moreover, Aliexpress never stops turning even more user-friendly and appealing. Its client base continues to expand, and more and more customers appear to trust the service in question.

The secret of AliExpress popularity also lies in how it all works. Its mode of functioning might seem prima facie to be pretty similar to all other B2C marketplaces. Still, there exist certain critical differences that must be mentioned in this regard:

• Possibility to compare products. Clearly, buyers can choose from multiple sellers and their goods, and the choice is much simplified by the fact that the items and their prices could easily be compared. Those who sell through AliExpress aren’t necessarily big corporations since small and middle-sized private enterprises can also distribute their commodities using this resource.
• Extensive selection of goods. It won’t be difficult to find on AliExpress a product a purchaser needs. Frankly speaking, there could be certain questions about the quality of those commodities, but this is a different story.
• Long time of shipment. Users of AliExpress have no choice but to be patient waiting for their orders to arrive. All the items get sent from China, thus, it’s pretty clear why the delivery process can be up to 40 days.

Key pros of AliExpress:

• priority to European customers and their necessities;
• reasonable prices;
• opportunities for the direct delivery of products;
• multiple payment options;
• possibility to provide feedback in different languages;
• a chance to attach real pictures of the items received;
• multilanguage support.

Have you ever thought about creating your own resource similar to the given marketplace? There are pretty valid grounds to take such an idea seriously.

Motivation to build an AliExpress-like platform:

• Inventory of products isn’t required. Being an owner of a B2C marketplace, you don’t have to sell your goods, if you don’t want to. You act more like a middleman. Thus, no need for stocking, meaning, there’ll be no extra costs.
• Promising stats. For the past few years, the annual increase of persons buying goods online is 20%. Consequently, it makes sense to develop another B2C marketplace today.
• Trigger mechanism. The idea is to manage to find your first sellers who’ll find their first happy clients on your platform, which will trigger the whole process. And afterward, the word of mouth will do the job to bring more and more users – both sellers and buyers – to your marketplace.
• Valuable analytics. Owners of AliExpress-like websites have effective tools to continuously study users’ behavior figuring out what could be improved to better respond to the demands of their audience.
• Impressive targeted audience coverage. If you compare online marketplaces with offline facilities, you’ll see the difference in the performance in favor of websites.