Aliexpress
The Case
AliExpress is a top-ranking international B to C cross-border electronic commerce platform under the Alibaba group based in China with offices worldwide, dedicated to providing global consumers with a convenient and efficient shopping experience. AliExpress brings together top-tier sellers from around the world, offering a wide range of products for consumers to choose from, including many products that are hard to find in physical stores.
In the early stage back in 2013, the Aliexpress ecommerce platform was pre-matured, only capable of tracking Cost Per Impression (CPM) attribution model. The foreseeable worldwide trend of transaction-based ecommerce business necessitated the urgent need to develop and test a new platform capable of tracking Cost Per Sales (CPS) attribution model.
Goals and Methods
A previous business entity run by AsiaGrowth's core executives was hired to become a strategic and the first affiliate partner by Aliexpress, and a team of business development, account management and media buying was quickly placed.
The team worked shoulder to shoulder to debug the current CPM tracking platform, a step necessary to lever up the data and expertise to develop the CPS tracking platform. Within one year, the CPS tracking platform was developed but it needed large amount of field tests by driving traffic from global countries and generating real transactions. Backed by solid media buy expertise, the team managed to drive the first 100,000 landings to the Aliexpress CPS platform, generating the first hundreds of user purchases. The data from this process was crucial for Aliexpress to identify and fix numerous conceptual and technical bugs. In the following few months, the team continued to drive up the traffic to million landings to the platform, stabilizing the conversion performance for both sides. The traffic continue to increase and be optimized for better conversion rate.
Result
In the years of 2014 through 2017, the team generated US$500M worth GMV per year for Aliexpress. The economic impact on both sides was enormous and non-substitutable, sustaining the position of being the first and key strategic affiliate partner of Aliexpress.