Alibaba has launched a brand-new English language website in an effort to double the number of global brands on its platform by 2022.
The Chinese ecommerce behemoth has today launched an English language portal on its Tmall marketplace, allowing brands from around the globe to sign up and begin selling to the Chinese market online for the first time.
This comes as the brand seeks to offset falling sales in its home market, and the potential impact of the growing trade war with the US, by doubling the number of foreign sellers on its platform to 40,000 over the next three years.
Its chief executive and co-founder Jack Ma has also set the goal to generate more than half of the company’s revenue from outside of China by 2025.
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“We believe the launch of this English-language website will expedite the process for brands and merchants to introduce their products to Chinese consumers,” Tmall Global’s deputy general manager Yi Qian said.
“The website will widen our reach to merchants, especially to those medium and small sized businesses around the world… We will help them with our logistics and marketing services.”
The new portal will allow English-speaking sellers to sign up to sell on Alibaba’s platform, which currently serves around 600 million buyers, in just 72 hours.
Prior to its introduction, foreign sellers could only join Tmall through personal introduction or by signing up at a trade fair.
Further foreign language portals, including Korean, Japanese and Spanish are also reportedly in the works.
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