1.0 ALIEXPRESS OVERVIEW

In 2009, AliExpress Limited was founded as a subsidiary of Alibaba Limited in San Mateo, California. AliExpress.com is a wholesale platform from Alibaba.com offering quality products at factory price (Company Overview of AliExpress Ltd, 2017). In April 2010, AliExpress Group was launched by Alibaba Group as a business to consumers (B2C) platform to give buyers and sellers access in anytime and anywhere. AliExpress is a B2C ecommerce platform which allows an individuals or companies to sell their products directly to overseas consumers. Besides that, the consumers in mainland China restricted to make purchase from the platform but allow to open stores in this platform. As the product is sell directly to overseas, AliExpress had provided multi-languages sites. For instance, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Korean, Thai and so on (SLATER, 2014). The prices and shipping costs of all products on AliExpress are charge in United States Dollar (USD) (Our Suggestion, n.d.). AliExpress was targeting ship to more than 200 countries and regions worldwide to increase their market share. Today, AliExpress have over 20 million Chinese exporters and manufacturers supplied more than 100 million product in the platforms.

As internet usage continues to growth, more and more consumers prefer to online shopping to get a better price because on this platform, users can find great variety of products offered by thousands of sellers. Moreover, consumer can easier to purchase the goods by searching the interested product with a click. This has make a drastic increase in international ecommerce as people look outside their own country’s border for that bargain (SLATER, 2014). Buyer can order as few as one item and pay safely using AliExpress Buyer Protection service (AliExpress Customer Service and Support, n.d.).

Moreover, AliExpress had prepared a set of guarantees for the safety purpose of all the buyer transaction on the platforms, also known as Buyer Protection. AliExpress Buyer Protection comes with a slogan “Protecting Your Purchase from Click to Delivery”. It’s also a way of AliExpress to increase the confidence of the buyers to shop on the platform. AliExpress was provided guarantees that ensure the buyers receive the item on time as described (Buyer Protection, n.d.). Therefore, the Buyer Protection is free for buyer. Once the buyers have confirmed received the item they ordered, the Buyer Protection is still effective for another 15 days. The amount of transaction will only be transferred to the seller once the buyers have confirmed receiving order, or when the Buyer Protection has ended (New User Guide, n.d.). For the Buyer Protection, if the buyer’s order does not reach within the delivery period promised by the seller, the buyers who shops on AliExpress can also receive full refund guarantees or the item you’re ordered is obviously different from the seller’s product description can also get full or partial refund. However, some of the sellers also offer extra guarantees for their products to increase consumer’s confidence which is provide full refund if the item that promise to be genuine is found to be fake (Buyer Protection, n.d.).

Lastly, AliExpress also have provide the feedback and star rating system to give the buyers measure the products quality or services provided by the seller. Therefore, Buyers can reviews the product ratings and feedback to get extra information about the product itself. The star ratings indicate the level of member satisfaction after completed transactions (How is feedback measured, n.d.). In order to increase the star ratings to increase the sales, most of the seller will keep improve their product quality or giving after sales services. Thus, if buyers have any enquiry about the product, they may contact with the seller directly through chat or send a message at the product detail page or shop.