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Alibaba’s AliExpress, PDD-owned Temu face supply chain challenges in South Korea amid rapid business expansion

  • Despite their popularity, AliExpress and Temu lag behind the competition in South Korea in terms of fast delivery and product quality assurance
  • Korean consumers find that proliferation of copycat merchandise is a major problem for Chinese online shopping platforms

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Online retail platforms AliExpress and Temu ranked as the two fastest-growing apps in South Korea in 2023, according to market research firm WiseApp. Photos: Shutterstock
Ann Caoin Shanghai

This article was first published by The Korea Times in a partnership with the South China Morning Post.

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China’s e-commerce giants are now the fastest-growing online platforms for Korean shoppers, but they are still grappling with problems of long delivery time and unstable product quality, according to consumers and retail industry officials.
Alibaba Group Holding and PDD, two of the largest e-commerce companies in China, have been aggressively expanding their foothold in South Korea, offering prices as low as US$1 for some small gadgets on their overseas shopping platforms AliExpress and Temu, respectively. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Launched in South Korea in 2018, AliExpress saw its monthly active users surpass 7 million as of last November, nearly doubling the number recorded a year earlier, according to mobile market research firm WiseApp. Temu, which started Korean operations in July, averages 3.5 million users per month. WiseApp ranked the two Chinese platforms as the fastest-growing apps in Korea in 2023.
But on the flip side, some consumers in Korea remain cautious about replacing local online retail sites, such as Coupang and Gmarket, owing to the Chinese platforms’ supply chain problems that include long delivery time and unstable product quality.
South Korea was ranked as the world’s fourth-largest e-commerce market with a projected revenue of US$139.8 billion in 2023, according to a report from online database ECDB. Photo: Shutterstock
South Korea was ranked as the world’s fourth-largest e-commerce market with a projected revenue of US$139.8 billion in 2023, according to a report from online database ECDB. Photo: Shutterstock

Lawrence Woo, a 38-year-old office worker in Seoul, started using AliExpress a year ago after he was lured by the platform’s low prices. Woo found, for example, a laptop stand on AliExpress that costs 30,000 won (US$23) and comes with free shipping, which was a deal around 50 per cent cheaper than those offered by local retail sites.

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