Amazon Global Selling, Ten Years On: Rivals Come and Go — Why Amazon Keeps Growing

The other day, I was scrolling through cross-border e-commerce news when a single number made me stop and double-check.

Chinese sellers' sales across Amazon's global marketplaces grew more than 20% in the past year — and in 2024, Chinese brand sellers' revenue climbed close to another 30%.

Whoa.

It is worth remembering that the naysayers have never really stopped talking about Amazon. Temu swept in with rock-bottom prices, SHEIN pushed fast fashion to new extremes, and TikTok Shop siphoned off traffic with livestreams. Everyone kept insisting that Amazon's good days were over.

Yet the numbers keep climbing.

That is strange. Why?

Bear with me — this story begins ten years ago. On one side is Amazon Global Selling; on the other, Chinese sellers. A decade later, the two have grown together into a single towering tree.

First, Amazon's answer: three things

On December 9, 2024, Amazon held its tenth Global Selling Cross-Border Summit in Shenzhen. There, it condensed its 2025 strategy into three pillars:

Drive Innovation, Expand Opportunity, Empower Localization.

Big-sounding phrases that only come to life when unpacked.

What does "Drive Innovation" mean? It means making selling less of a burden. Amazon hands you AI that cleans up product pages, writes marketing copy, and keeps an eye on operations, all in one tool set. On top of that is an upgraded supply-chain service, the "Amazon Managed Service," which chains logistics, warehousing, and delivery together. You make the goods; it takes care of the rest.

What does "Expand Opportunity" mean? More doors. As planned, Ireland opens to sellers in 2025, and with it the count of overseas marketplaces open to Chinese sellers reaches 20. Every extra country adds customers and adds business.

What does "Empower Localization" mean? Getting closer to you. Amazon upgraded its Nanjing office, folding it into the Yangtze River Delta Cross-Border E-Commerce Industrial Park in Jianye District — pulling supply chain and services right up against sellers.

The official push includes more than thirty initiatives. What actually caught my eye was a quieter move: Amazon Haul, a budget storefront first rolled out in Dongguan — a low-cost chain from sourcing to delivery that will spread to more markets.

Some frown at the word "budget." Isn't Amazon cheapening itself?

Amazon figures otherwise. A low price is the door-opener: let consumers notice you first, then gradually build the brand.

Put the three pillars together, and it comes down to one line: when everyone assumed Amazon would sit back and defend, Amazon chose to attack on three fronts at once.

And here's why Amazon is so certain: it has walked this road for ten years.

In 2014, Amazon Global Selling began to expand outward on a serious scale: simpler onboarding, better logistics, more payment options. In a word, it opened the doors for overseas sellers.

In 2017, the wind changed. Chinese sellers began to shine, and Amazon pivoted hard, pouring resources into Chinese seller support — training, technology, overseas warehousing — added piece by piece. That bet paid off.

In 2020, it stepped up a level: from "moving goods" to "building an ecosystem." Logistics, after-sales, local policies — all pointed at one goal, helping sellers set down roots in each market.

Ten years on, Amazon Global Selling is no longer a single product line but a fully formed global e-commerce network.

China's decade: from imports to exports

Amazon's ten-year story and China's cross-border decade overlapped.

In 2014, cross-border activity was a niche. Most of it was import — ordering foreign goods from home — while exports leaned on traditional trade and B2B at a modest scale. Alibaba and JD dipped a toe in early, but the rails — the logistics, the payments — lagged, and consumers were shy.

The real turn came with policy, in 2015. The government's five-year e-commerce plan flagged cross-border e-commerce and popularized a phrase: "Internet + foreign trade." With import-retail taxes eased, the barrier to cross-border shopping fell away.

Then things moved quickly. AliExpress, JD Worldwide, and Pinduoduo entered market by market, and the wave spread from first-tier cities into second- and third-tier cities.

2017 was another dividing line. Policy broadened, oversight sharpened, and the industry shifted from raw vigor into regulated growth. It is also the year the "overseas warehouse" model caught on: pre-build warehouses at the destination, gain faster logistics, sharper experiences, lower costs.

Export was fired up by the Belt and Road Initiative, too. Waves of small and mid-sized enterprises went global through cross-border trade, and Chinese goods appeared everywhere — Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.

2020 needed almost no explanation: offline stores shut, sellers moved online en masse, and cross-border trade soaked up the shift. Today China is among the world's leading cross-border e-commerce exporters, and cross-border commerce has become a principal engine of foreign-trade growth.

Read the numbers yourself:

In the first half of 2024, China's cross-border e-commerce imports and exports came to 1.22 trillion yuan, up 10.5% year on year — supported by more than 1,000 cross-border industrial parks, more than 2,500 overseas warehouses, and more than 120,000 active cross-border e-commerce enterprises.

Within the global e-commerce market, China sits at the top — with $3 trillion in volume and a 47% penetration rate.

There is a quieter layer of change underneath: the people shopping cross-border have changed. Ten years ago, they were drawn by price. Today, it is about quality and brand. Chinese sellers are rewriting what "made in China" stands for.

The global market's decade: a play in three acts

Step further back. The last ten years of global cross-border e-commerce have essentially run like a play in three acts.

Act one, 2014–2017: founding. Amazon and eBay were already doing cross-border, but only in the high-income economies — the US and Europe — and on a small scale. India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America were dark: logistics broken, payments spotty, local services thin — they could not grow fast. What did improve was the undeniable momentum of the smartphone, through which young customers began buying foreign-made goods online. Logistics and payment systems matured around it — DHL and FedEx smoothed shipping, PayPal and Stripe turned payments into a mundane utility — and platforms each staked out their own turf: Amazon moved into non-English markets, eBay nurtured armies of small sellers through auctions, and AliExpress quietly put down roots in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

Act two, 2018–2020: melee. Social commerce arrived — Pinduoduo, Facebook, and Instagram made "browse and buy" a new species, and content marketing became the ticket to winning customers. Local heavyweights also rose: Flipkart in India and Mercado Libre in Brazil, scaling fast on cost advantage and local delivery. But the sharpest shock to the industry was the US–China trade friction that started in 2018 — waves of tariffs and policy twists that drove every player to practice "localization." Overseas warehouses and flexible supply chains were almost all children of that necessity.

Act three, 2020 onward: reshuffle. The pandemic made online shopping the default; cross-border commerce became a growth engine. Technology added fuel: AI, big data, and cloud computing made recommendations ever more attuned to you; automated warehousing and autonomous delivery pushed efficiency to new heights.

Three acts, one sentence: there is no shortcut in cross-border e-commerce — whoever knows the local consumer best wins.

Here come the Four Little Dragons

At the card table, Amazon had barely taken its seat when four opponents rose across from it:

Temu, SHEIN, AliExpress, TikTok Shop.

Some call them the "Four Little Dragons." Their most lethal weapon is price: Temu took the Chinese supply-chain price war overseas, SHEIN pushed fast fashion to new extremes, AliExpress is the veteran back at the table, and TikTok Shop harvests attention with short video and livestreams. Low price, fashion, daily essentials — all sit exactly on Amazon's comparatively "soft" territory.

How does Amazon answer? Four ways.

One — deepen a strength. Broad selection, strong brands, fast delivery: that is Amazon's home turf. FBA keeps improving, warehouse capacity keeps growing, and delivery speeds keep rising. In mature markets such as Western Europe and the US, "fast" is itself a moat.

Two — mend the price weakness. In 2023, Amazon trimmed commissions on low-price categories: for items under $15, the commission fell from 17% to 5%; for items from $15 to $20, from 17% to 10%. Do the math: on a $10 item, you save a bit more than one dollar in commission. That is the confidence to fight the Four Little Dragons for the budget end of the market.

Three — serve sellers well. Small sellers get sharper advertising tools and more exposure; Prime keeps adding value to hold on to the most loyal customers.

Four — push localization into emerging markets. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other markets where the Four Little Dragons move fast, Amazon presses all the harder: backing local suppliers, strengthening local warehousing and delivery, and partnering with local logistics firms to grind cross-border logistics costs down bit by bit.

Across these four moves, one detail stands out: Amazon has not danced to the Four Little Dragons' rhythm — it has kept playing chess at its own tempo. You wage your price war; I wage my ecosystem war.

The tree planted ten years ago

Back to the opening question: why does it hold on?

The answer is written across every page of these ten years. It was never one surprise attack; it was the unglamorous business of "selling goods," done steadily for a decade — building roads, filling warehouses, growing ecosystems, year after year.

Industries change, rivals rotate, and the names at the card table are swapped out every few years. But the time poured into logistics, ecosystem, and localization over the past decade does not reset to zero because of one round of a price war.

This tree was planted ten years ago. Today, its roots run deeper than anyone else's.

That saying comes to mind: do your work in March and April, and the answer comes in August and September. If you are in foreign trade, it is worth looking back at the ten years behind you. A company bold enough to sink a decade into one direction deserves a second look, no matter how many times the card table changes.