Shopify and JD.com have entered into a strategic partnership, making it easier for US merchants to sell to consumers in China as e-commerce competition intensifies. With a population of 1.4 billion, China is home to the world's largest e-commerce market, estimated to be worth $3.3 trillion by 2025, five times larger than the US e-commerce market.

“Bringing together two world-class commerce platforms—Shopify and JD.com—is a major step in solving cross-border commerce for merchants," said Aaron Brown, Vice President at Shopify. "The future of commerce is commerce everywhere—and that starts by removing barriers to entry to one of the most important ecommerce markets in the world.”

China has often remained inaccessible to independent businesses and start-ups abroad despite this enormous potential. Regulatory and logistical barriers as well as complexities related to pricing, duties, and translations can be daunting to deal with and cost prohibitive. The partnership between Shopify and JD.com unlocks the world's largest e-commerce market for merchants by providing access to one of China's leading e-commerce marketplaces.

Shopify merchants will have access to sell on JD's cross-border platform JD Worldwide, tapping into its 550 million active customers in China who are shopping for authentic, high-quality products from brands around the globe. Compared to the 12 months typically required for foreign brands to begin selling in China, Shopify merchants in the US can be up and running in as quickly as three to four weeks.

To support merchants in their effort to begin selling into China, the channel will provide:

• Expedited onboarding to help merchants sell quickly.
• Logistics that handle end-to-end fulfillment from JD's US warehouses directly to consumers in China, leveraging JD.com's China-US cargo flights, 1,300+ warehouses, and 200,000+ delivery personnel in China.
• Smart price conversion to local currency based on foreign exchange rates, typical category pricing, as well as VAT and Consumption Tax.
• Intelligent translation of product names and descriptions.

“JD.com is thrilled to partner with Shopify," said Daniel Tan, President of JD Worldwide. "We believe that the partnership will unlock the huge potential of the Chinese market for brands outside of China. At the same time, it will increase cross-border commerce by leveraging our global supply chain abilities, simplifying what has traditionally been a very complicated process.”

The JD Marketplace sales channel is part of a larger strategic partnership between Shopify and JD.com that aims to help solve cross-border commerce challenges across product sourcing, selling, and logistics for merchants in the US and China.