‘Made in China, sold on Amazon’ community seeks to cut reliance on US e-commerce giant, trade group says

Chinese merchants are seeking alternative online retail marketplaces to reach overseas consumers amid Amazon’s crackdown on platform violations

Some of these merchants have started to invest in AliExpress, eBay, Shopify and other international online retail platforms

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The share of Chinese online merchants on Amazon.com’s US site surged to 63 per cent this year, up from 28 per cent in 2019. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:00pm, 11 Aug 2021Updated: 11:39pm, 11 Aug 2021

The “Made in China, sold on Amazon” community plans to reduce their reliance on the world’s biggest e-commerce marketplace, according to a Shenzhen-based trade body, as Chinese merchants expect business conditions to get harsher on the US online retail site amid a crackdown that has shut down more than 50,000 of the group’s stores.

Chinese vendors must seek alternatives because Seattle-based Amazon.com is unlikely to ease up on its campaign against certain practices, such as encouraging customers to write good reviews, according to Wang Xin, executive chairman of Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Association, a trade body representing more than 2,600 cross-border trading companies in the city that sell products to consumers overseas.

“Amazon is determined to regulate sellers [on its platform], especially after the influx of Chinese merchants in the past few years,” Wang said on Tuesday. “Their rules will only become more stringent.”

The association was established in 2014 by 52 cross-border merchants in Shenzhen, known as China’s answer to Silicon Valley and home to some of the country’s biggest technology companies. The city has more than 40,000 firms involved in the cross-border e-commerce business, which account for about 35 per cent of this sector across China, according to the trade body.

Amazon packages are sorted inside the company’s logistics facility in Vélizy-Villacoublay, France. China’s cross-border e-commerce vendors represented 75 per cent of all new merchants in Amazon in January this year, according to consultancy Marketplace Pulse. Photo: Shutterstock

As more Chinese merchants have flocked to international retail sites like Amazon and eBay to reach additional consumers, some have brought with them grey area practices common in Chinese marketplaces. These include making up fake reviews and inflating sales numbers, according to industry insiders.

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