Among China’s cross-border sellers, Europe and the US have long been among the most closely watched markets.
Sellers from Shenzhen neighborhoods such as Bantian, Longhua, and Huaqiangbei have built a mature playbook around Amazon, TikTok Shop, Temu, and independent e-commerce sites. It includes product selection, paid traffic acquisition, mass listings, brand building, overseas warehouses, influencer marketing, and more.
In many ways, China’s supply chain has brought intense competition to nearly every corner of global e-commerce.
But since 2025, more sellers have begun to see a shift: Europe and the US are becoming harder markets to crack.
Small-parcel tariffs, logistics costs, and platform rules are becoming more restrictive. Competition is also shifting from a race for incremental growth to a zero-sum contest in saturated markets. Several sellers said expensive traffic, competitive advertising, and thinning margins are weighing on profits, even as many stores continue to see rising gross merchandise value (GMV).
As a result, many Chinese sellers have begun searching for new markets. This time, they are looking at a region long overlooked by much of China’s cross-border e-commerce sector: Russia and the broader Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS.
“Over the past year, a great many sellers that originally focused on Europe and the US have shifted to the Russian-speaking region to serve the CIS market,” Simon Huang, president of Ozon for the Greater China region, told 36Kr.
For many Chinese sellers, Russia has always felt both familiar and unfamiliar.
It is familiar because of its scale. Russia has a population of around 150 million. Together with the five Central Asian countries, Belarus, and other CIS countries, the broader region has a total population of about 250 million, making it roughly comparable to Indonesia in population size.
It is unfamiliar because, for a long time, the market lacked mature e-commerce infrastructure. Chinese companies that wanted to enter Russia mostly had to rely on traditional trade, moving goods through layers of agents, offline channels, costly logistics networks, and inefficient distribution systems. Some Chinese brands even ended up as local private-label products.
That is beginning to change.
According to figures disclosed by Ozon, Russia’s e-commerce market reached RUB 14 trillion (USD 189.5 billion) in 2025. By 2029, that figure is expected to grow to RUB 30 trillion (USD 406.1 billion). At the same time, Russia’s e-commerce penetration rate remains only 23%, far below mature markets such as China and South Korea.
That suggests a large incremental market is only beginning to open up. In this shift, Ozon, one of Russia’s largest e-commerce platforms, is becoming one of the main gateways for Chinese sellers entering the CIS market.
Russia’s long-overlooked market begins to accelerate
Russia’s e-commerce development lags China’s by at least a decade. Ozon was founded in 1998, earlier than Taobao. But for its first 20 years, it was closer to a small, curated website for books, cultural products, and creative goods. It was not until around 2018 that Ozon pivoted more decisively to a marketplace model and began to grow faster.
“2018 was a key dividing line,” Huang told 36Kr. “By then, the success path for global e-commerce platforms had become very clear. Amazon, Alibaba, JD.com, as well as platforms such as Shopee and Coupang, had all shown that e-commerce marketplaces are a business model with enormous economies of scale and network effects.”
After that transition, Ozon began investing heavily. Over the past five years, it has built more than five million square meters of warehouse space in Russia, deployed more than 20,000 full-time drivers and transport vehicles, and established a network of more than 84,000 pickup points, covering more than 90% of users.
Behind those figures is a contest over infrastructure. Russia’s biggest e-commerce challenge has not been consumer spending power, but fulfillment. The country spans Europe and Asia, with vast distances, sparse population density, long winters, and high logistics costs. Outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, much of the population lives in small and midsize cities, towns, and rural areas.
Traditional logistics companies are often unwilling to absorb such infrastructure costs. E-commerce platforms, however, have little choice. “Only when logistics infrastructure works can the e-commerce business model stand,” Huang told 36Kr.
Ozon then did something familiar to observers of China’s e-commerce sector: it turned logistics, pickup points, subsidies, payments, and digital capabilities into platform infrastructure.
Its pickup point network is a model shaped by Russian consumer behavior.
Unlike in China, where home delivery is common, Russian consumers are more accustomed to collecting purchases from nearby pickup points. Ozon initially tried to build its own network, but found the pace too slow. It then shifted to a franchise model, allowing individuals to convert their own spaces into Ozon pickup points while sharing in GMV-based revenue from the platform.
The number of pickup points quickly expanded to 84,000. Consumers can try on products, test items, return goods, and even complete secondary deliveries there.
“This is a very strong network effect,” Huang said. “The larger the logistics scale, the lower the cost and the faster the delivery. The more users there are, the more willing merchants are to join. The more merchants there are, the richer the choices for consumers.”
That logic resembles the flywheel that powered China’s e-commerce sector over the past decade. Now that the infrastructure is more mature, Chinese sellers are beginning to enter the market in earnest.
Why Chinese sellers are looking beyond Europe and the US
Over the past few years, Chinese cross-border sellers have gone through an intense round of global competition.
Rising traffic costs in Europe and the US, changes in tariff policies, and stricter platform rules have pushed many sellers to reassess their global strategies. The Russian-speaking market is emerging as a new destination.
“The CIS market is still an incremental growth market. Sellers do not need to fight over existing demand,” Huang told 36Kr.
Compared with Europe and the US, Russia and the CIS share one defining feature: e-commerce is still in a rapid growth stage. Consumer demand has long been underserved, while China’s supply chain has a strong value-for-money advantage, especially in lower-tier markets.
Huang said more than 100 million people in Russia live in small and midsize cities, towns, and rural areas, and that these consumers are highly price-sensitive. Sellers from China’s manufacturing clusters, including Fujian’s footwear and apparel industry, Yiwu’s small commodities sector, and the Pearl River Delta’s consumer electronics ecosystem, can meet this demand at competitive prices.
Chinese sellers have therefore begun entering the market in large numbers. Ozon now has more than 750,000 active sellers, with Chinese sellers accounting for more than 20% of them.
Among these sellers, two distinct paths are emerging.
The first is the mass listing model common among sellers from manufacturing clusters. These sellers carry large numbers of stock-keeping units (SKUs) rely on mature enterprise resource planning systems to refine operations, and use value-for-money positioning to reach Russia’s lower-tier markets.
The second consists of Chinese companies trying to build brands. This is the type of seller Huang values most.
“In the future, AI will level many operational advantages,” he said. “What can really create long-term barriers are brands, IP, technology, aesthetics, and user trust.”
In his view, Chinese sellers’ greatest advantages in the past were information asymmetry and operational efficiency. But as artificial intelligence matures, those advantages are weakening. AI can handle product selection analysis, localized translation, content generation, advertising optimization, customer service, store management, and more.
AI can also operate around the clock. “In the past, the biggest advantage of large sellers was that they could pile on a lot of operations staff. But now that ‘AI employees’ have appeared, that advantage is gone,” Huang said.
That is pushing sellers back to a basic question: what is their core asset?
If everyone can find supply chains and use AI for operations, then brand may be one of the few assets that endures. That helps explain why more Chinese sellers are beginning to make longer-term investments in the Russian market. Some are registering local trademarks. Others are doing localized marketing, working with Russian key opinion leaders, or opening local pop-up stores.
In Huang’s view, Chinese cross-border sellers are moving from short-term arbitrage to longer-term operations.
“Short-termism is becoming harder and harder,” he said.
How AI lowers the threshold for cross-border sellers
In the interview with 36Kr, Huang repeatedly mentioned one term: OPC, or one-person company. He believes AI is pushing cross-border e-commerce into a new stage.
In the past, a cross-border e-commerce team might have needed operations staff, designers, copywriters, customer service personnel for less commonly used languages, data analysts, and advertising buyers. Now, AI is beginning to replace or augment many of these roles.
“In the future, many companies will not need to hire a lot of employees. What they need are digital workers,” Huang said.
In his view, AI is going beyond improving efficiency to restructure the rules of competition.
First, AI can reduce information asymmetry. In the past, the value of an experienced operator lay partly in knowing platform rules, how to select products, and how to run ads. AI can now analyze public global data at low cost and identify trends and demand more quickly.
Second, AI could weaken the advantage of organizational scale. Large sellers once built efficiency barriers by hiring more people. With AI, small teams, or even a single person, can gain operational capabilities that were once available mainly to large companies. That means the threshold for starting a cross-border e-commerce business is falling.
“In the future, more and more operators will leave to start their own businesses,” Huang said. “As long as they are equipped with an AI tool, they can get going.”
At the same time, AI is making the industry less forgiving. When everyone can operate efficiently, the real differentiators are no longer only operations. They are products, brands, IP, user trust, content aesthetics, and consumer insight.
This is why Huang has consistently emphasized brand building and compliance. From his perspective, the most important assets in the future of cross-border e-commerce will be the things AI cannot quickly replicate, especially patents, trademarks, technology, brand awareness, and customer relationships.
This also suggests that China’s cross-border e-commerce sector is moving beyond its earlier phase of unfettered growth. The era of relying on information asymmetry, traffic arbitrage, and mass listings is gradually giving way to a more demanding phase. Platforms are investing more in infrastructure. Sellers are investing more in brands. AI is improving efficiency. Competition is shifting back toward long-term execution.
For Ozon, the goal is to become the infrastructure provider for this shift. For Chinese sellers, Russia and the CIS represent a new source of growth. As AI, logistics infrastructure, and global supply chains recombine, a market long overlooked by many sellers is being rediscovered.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Peng Xiaoqiu for 36Kr.