AliExpress Russia has just disclosed a series of interesting activity indicators — from audience, to sourcing, to logistics — confirming its leadership on the cross-border e-commerce segment and a growing traction on the domestic segment.
- By the end of 2020, the platform’s monthly audience reached some 29.1 million users (8.8 million daily). The platform does particularly well on social networks, including Odnoklassniki and VK, with some 8 million users attracted from there every month. In total AliExpress Russia claims 61 million registered users as of late 2020.
- In terms of sourcing, AliExpress Russia now claims more than 35,000 domestic (Russian) merchants, who offer up to 5.5 million different items and generate 25% of the platform’s sales volume. Eighty percent of these local sellers are SMBs. Russian sellers have been invited to sell goods through the platform since 2015.
- Products from Russia are delivered in 4.5 days on average. Those from China — which still account for the better part of AliExpress Russia’s business — take 15 days on average. The company claims such deliveries are now twice as fast as in late 2019. The ‘Plus’ service, launched in 2020, offers customers a 14-day delivery guarantee.
- The company says it is investing some 2 billion rubles ($27.1 million at the current exchange rate) over two years (2020-21) to subsidise local sellers — for example with zero-commission offers.
Other company projects include developing own-branded pick-up points as well as a specific Russian app.
AliExpress previously announced that, during the first eight months of last year, the average ticket almost doubled from the previous year to 1,500 rubles (around $20-$23 based on the exchange rate evolutions of said period). AliExpress analysts attributed this spike to the general increase in online shopping activity during the lockdown period, from April to June 2020, in Russia.
Launched by Alibaba in the early 2010s, AliExpress Russia is now a joint venture of Alibaba, Mail.ru Group — the owner of Odnoklassniki and VK, — Russian telco MegaFon and sovereign fund Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). Hundreds of millions of US dollars are being invested in this joint venture.
