April 23, 2026
SEOUL – Chinese e-commerce platforms, or C-commerce, are tightening their grip on South Korea’s retail market, turning it into a cross-border price war playing to households feeling the pinch.
AliExpress and Temu sit at the forefront, with user bases that rank among the largest in Korea’s e-commerce market.
Data from WiseApp Retail shows that in the January-March period, AliExpress and Temu drew 8.57 million and 8 million monthly active users, respectively.
Barring Coupang, the two platforms have already overtaken most major domestic players, with 11street at 7.7 million users, Naver’s Plus Store at 7.52 million and Gmarket at 6.9 million. Combined, their 16.5 million users amount to half the reach of market leader Coupang, which logged 33.25 million.
Temu led all shopping apps in March with 749,320 new installs, according to IGAWorks’ Mobile Index. Naver Plus Store was the top domestic platform with 674,100 installs, while AliExpress added 369,020.
Their deepening foothold speaks to a recalibration in consumer behavior, industry officials said, as inflation eats into household budgets and pushes shoppers toward more practical, value-driven purchases over discretionary spending.
According to the Ministry of Data and Statistics, inflation-adjusted average monthly consumption spending fell 0.4 percent last year, marking the first annual decline in five years since 2020, even as nominal spending rose.
“As price becomes a central factor in consumer decisions, more users are gravitating toward low-cost Chinese e-commerce platforms,” one industry official said.
Others point to younger consumers, highly attuned to price and trends, as a key force behind the platforms’ rise.
That dynamic comes through most clearly in fashion, where Chinese online fashion platform Shein, for instance, saw users in their 20s and 30s nearly triple to 1.22 million in January from a year earlier, according to WiseApp Retail. The trend is already feeding through to trade data, with imports of Chinese clothing hitting a record $4.89 billion last year, up 8.1 percent on-year.
“With low brand loyalty and a readiness to adopt new platforms, consumers in their 10s and 20s can bring about rapid changes in the market as trends shift,” one industry source said. “If a platform fails to evolve alongside consumers, it will inevitably cede ground to the next generation of platforms.”
Though it may look like a unilateral broadside, Chinese platforms are also emerging as conduits connecting Korea’s e-commerce ecosystem to broader global markets.
JD.com’s recent tie-up with 11street, for example, allows Korean sellers to list products on its cross-border platform, JD Worldwide, with end-to-end fulfillment handled by JD Logistics. This enables them to focus on product competitiveness as more Korean fashion and beauty goods flow onto its platform.
“Through our Korean subsidiary, we intend to actively support the export of Korean brands to China via a direct sourcing model,” said Kim Min-hwa, head of JD.com Korea, at an export consultation session in March.
A similar playbook is unfolding at Gmarket, which has been leveraging Alibaba’s global platforms, such as Lazada, to expand cross-border sales. In March, Gmarket took part in a trade plaza in China, hosting export consultations for Korean firms. There, participants showed strong interest in its streamlined onboarding, integrated logistics and localized marketing capabilities.
Over the longer term, however, such partnerships could carry risks, some industry officials say.
Despite granting access to global logistics networks and overseas demand, they could foster dependence that erodes bargaining power over fees and data usage, as one industry official puts it.
“It seems imperative for Korean companies to leverage Chinese e-commerce platforms as a springboard, while retaining strategic control and building their own overseas networks,” the official noted.