Chinese platforms help US small businesses reach global markets

Tanner Planes, co-founder of third-party logistics company ShipVelocity, described a similar experience.

Planes, who grew up in California and started e-commerce at age 16, said most of his clients source products from China and then sell them through platforms such as Shopify, TikTok Shop and Amazon. He estimated that about 90 percent of his clients use Chinese suppliers, citing price competitiveness, manufacturing consistency and established industrial infrastructure.

"Alibaba.com actually helped me with my first ever e-commerce store all the way back in 2017," Planes said.

In the early days, he recalled, entrepreneurs had to communicate with suppliers and manage many sourcing tasks themselves. That process has become easier as Alibaba.com has developed AI-supported tools, he said.

"There's a lot of infrastructure in China that helps us," Planes said. "They can make a lot and consistently, like the same quality."

The bigger shift at this year's CoCreate, however, was artificial intelligence.

Alibaba.com announced an expanded version of Accio, its agentic AI platform for commerce, designed to combine market research, sourcing, product development and day-to-day e-commerce operations in one workspace.

"For small businesses, unaffordable AI is useless," said Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com. "Our goal is not simply to make AI more powerful. It is to make commerce AI practical and affordable for even a one-person company."

Accio completed 107 commerce tasks at an estimated cost of $3.69, versus $9.27 for OpenAI's Codex and $9.51 for Anthropic's Claude Code, while delivering comparable quality. The platform also helps small businesses research markets, find products, evaluate suppliers and manage operations across major e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Shopify, eBay, TikTok Shop and Walmart.

The growing use of agentic AI also comes as entrepreneurship is becoming more individual-driven. Alibaba.com said 71 percent of more than 15,000 applicants to its final pitch competition identified as solo founders.

Winston Ma, executive director at the Global Public Investment Funds Forum at New York University, said the broader significance of Chinese AI platforms lies in their ability to combine capability with affordability, making advanced tools more accessible to small businesses and entrepreneurs with limited resources.

"It's about global access, including emerging markets and people's access to the most advanced AI solutions," Ma told China Daily.

He said for smaller companies that often lack the resources of multinational corporations but still want to compete globally, lower-cost Chinese AI systems could help narrow that gap.

"Chinese open-source models, such as Alibaba's AI offerings and DeepSeek, provide a significant opportunity for emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia," Ma said, arguing that lower costs can broaden access to advanced AI capabilities.

He added that agentic AI could also reshape how small companies operate. Instead of outsourcing isolated tasks, entrepreneurs may increasingly delegate broader layers of execution to AI systems, allowing founders to focus more on strategy, product development and long-term vision.

"For global cross-border e-commerce, you have founders in China, you have founders in the US and you also have founders in emerging markets," Ma said. "Now this platform allows all the founders ... to have the same tools to be efficient."