Alibaba will confront Amazon directly in the field of online shopping in Europe

China’s largest online shopping company is preparing to hit overseas markets.

On Sunday, retail giant Alibaba introduced its first European store in Madrid, Spain, in the city’s Intu Xanadu shopping center. The new store will belong to AliExpress – Alibaba’s consumer shopping division, and function as a showroom where shoppers can come, search and try out products offered by the company, then buy them. from the online application.

Alibaba’s store in Madrid

This showroom will feature over 1,000 products from 60 different brands.

Moving from online shopping to real-life stores in Europe is part of Alibaba’s big plan to increase market share in the global market and confront Amazon, which now has annual sales. 4 times higher than your own value.

Although Alibaba has a 56% market share in China, and its user base is growing at a fairly fast pace – 674 million people regularly shop on its platform, and only in the previous quarter, Alibaba There are an additional 121 million regular users – but in the international marketplace, they still have a lot of work to do to catch up with Amazon.

However, this is not the first time Alibaba has entered foreign markets. In early 2018, the airline opened its AliExpress affiliate program in Europe. The program works in a similar way to Amazon’s own marketplace, where sellers can use Alibaba’s portal to sell their items and send them abroad to customers using its delivery network. a small fee.

According to market research firm Kantar, Alibaba’s plan has brought positive results in Spain, as it is now one of its largest markets besides the US and Russia.

” This makes the store opening in Madrid a possible strategic decision to attract more shoppers to China’s online market,” wrote Malcolm Pinkerton of Kantar.

Alibaba is not just aimed at Europe. The company has also launched a campaign to promote its wholesale business in the US, on Alibaba.com.

In July, the company launched new digital tools to encourage domestic transactions in the US and enhance its presence in the global $ 23.9 trillion B2B market.

“China has long been a source of good quality products, low price” – Michael Evans, chairman of Alibaba Group, said at a press conference at the event office in New York City Alibaba January 7. “Today Now, we give small businesses and big wholesalers in the US the ability to store and trade with each other, and for small businesses to sell their products to countries around the world. “

Its expansion program is designed to allow 30 million US manufacturers access to the resources needed to build their own commercial websites on Alibaba.com, as well as build marketing campaigns. in the digital world.

According to Evans, Alibaba’s strategy is not to follow what Amazon has done, but to focus on places where Amazon has not gone by focusing on developing a wholesale platform in the US.

” Basically, it’s choosing famous American brands and selling their products to Chinese customers who like American products that are using our platform, and we have had unexpected success with that strategy “- he said.

Reference: BusinessInsider