Alibaba set out to escalate its presence in Europe.

It may seem like  Amazon is going to gobble up all the eCommerce any day now. Although the massive expansion of the booming retail market is quite significant, the industry is also embracing small retail and boutique shops. Some companies took this concept to a global platform.

Surely, a lot of small businesses offer their services and products through online means(either through shops on their websites or some third party websites), a few companies took the e-commerce thing to the next level.

When it comes to online retail, there are only a few companies that we can view as having a material global presence. The US-based Amazon and the Chinese Alibaba – both are dominating the online retail sphere and have been comparable for years now. However, it is remarkable that the Chinese company was started five years after Amazon.

Given that, the two companies have been juxtaposed as competitors always, their approach and roads to success have been extremely different till the very present day.

Alibaba has its European expansion called AliExpress, and recently it has had a considerable influx of smaller European retailers.

During the Global Shipping Festival AliExpress invited over 3,500 Key Online Influencers and bloggers from Russia, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Poland, Korea & Middle-East to promote sellers and products on their social media accounts. With the total number of KOLs’ followers exceeding 100 million, AliExpress has potential access to over 10% of the population in these key markets. Furthermore, it has been quite evident and public that Alibaba intends to expand in the European market, and there have been noticeable efforts for scouting, research, and setting the field for expansion by the company.

According to the sources, Alibaba has already approached several brands with an offer to join its new platform. The brands cited by the sources are Mango, Benetton, and Spanish fashion group Tendam.

“With space to design their stores within the platform, brands can build their homepage, with pictures and video, to create the feel they want.”, head of AliExpress, Wang Mingqiang.

The company is initially targeting the Spanish and Italian markets. At the same time, they are also focusing on Euro-Asia gateway countries like Turkey and Russia. The retail giant Alibaba launched its first European store in Spain. The new store is a part of the AliExpress banner – the consumer shopping site of its business. It is planned to function like a showroom where shoppers can visit to browse and test the range of products available and then buy these online. The showroom will feature more than 1,000 products from 60 brands.

Alibaba’s move to get into brick and mortar in Europe could be anticipated as a global approach to grow its market share versus that of Amazon, whose annual revenue is more than four times the size of its own.  Alibaba is estimated to occupy 56% of the market share in China with a growing user rate, which is 674 million customers who are active shoppers. But, it still has some way to go to keep up with Amazon internationally.