Tmall Global Offers Support Program to Overseas Merchants

On February 10, Chinese tech giant Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Financial unveiled several measures to support small- and medium-sized  merchants affected by the coronavirus outbreak.  

Here are some of the main measures:

-      Reduced or waived platform fees. Alibaba will stop charging service fees and commissions for the first half of 2020 for new Tmall Global merchants onboarding before July 1st, 2020. Merchants will also have access to the store decoration tool ‘Winpool’ free of charge.

-      Waived fees for warehouse rental space and logistics. Alibaba will offer two months of waived fees for Cainiao bonded warehouses and overseas warehouses, to help merchants save on logistics costs. Cainiao will also provide freight subsidies for orders shipped through Cianiao overseas warehouses.

-      Lowered threshold for automatic funds settlement. From now until February 20th, Tmall Global merchants can apply to reduce the threshold for automatic cross-border funds settlement through Alipay.  Taobao, Tmall and logistics arm Cainiao also co-launched an RMB 1 billion fund to compensate merchants and delivery companies, enabling them to have waived fees and subsidies.

-      Low-interest and interest-free loans. Ant Financial announced low-interest loans for Tmall Global merchants, reducing rates by 1%.