Currently, the domestic C2C export retail platforms are mainly AliExpress (AE), Taobao Overseas, Amazon, and eBay, where merchants directly enter the platform and have strong operability; while LightInTheBox and DHgate.com are B2C models, where merchants uniformly hand over goods to the platform for management.

Take AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay, which have strong merchant operability, as examples. AliExpress is a C2C platform built by Alibaba for the international market. Its operation and store management model is similar to Taobao, emphasizing the independent operation ability of stores; while Amazon is product-centric, and as long as there are good products, it can get a lot of recommendations; eBay's customer group is relatively obvious, mainly European and American consumers.

According to the AliExpress clerk, the platform has now covered more than 200 countries, among which Russia, Brazil, Spain, Indonesia, and the United States are key countries with high user numbers and high activity, and there are more than 200,000 merchants on the platform. Merchant categories are mainly concentrated in clothing, 3C digital, sports, beauty, auto parts, furniture, mother and baby, etc. The sales of these mainstream categories are more than 10 million per day, and the sales will double or more during the platform promotion period.

Looking back on the development of the e-commerce export retail market, it started in 2010 and developed in 2012. Initially, compared with the mature domestic market, export retail was still a blue ocean. Therefore, some entrepreneurs who wanted to enter the e-commerce industry chose overseas markets to avoid the fierce competition in the domestic market. With the growth of the influence and traffic of export retail platforms, foreign consumers' recognition of Chinese manufacturing and brands has also attracted a group of Internet brands to start laying out overseas market channels.

The sales potential of merchants in overseas markets is closely related to product categories. It is well known that China is a manufacturing power, and some processing and manufacturing products will be more recognized overseas. For example, clothing accessories, 3C digital products, etc. However, after the financial crisis, most domestic clothing manufacturers and brands have shifted their targets to the domestic market, which can be seen from the fact that clothing has become a major category of Taobao transactions. Therefore, most merchants who initially opened up overseas markets focused on categories such as accessories, furniture, and 3C digital products. There are big differences in the operation of non-standard products and standard products.