Prime has not helped in China as Amazon's market share still hovers around 1% while locals like Alibaba and JD.com offer better deals and shopping experience
Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @tcarmody and @shiraovide Tweets: Tim Carmody / @tcarmody : Alibaba ain't Wal-Mart http://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : It was two people. Now it's five. http://www.wsj.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
By 2017 Amazon had spent years trying to transplant its Prime playbook into China, and the Wall Street Journal's verdict is blunt: membership perks have not moved a market share stuck around 1%, because Alibaba and JD.com compete on price and shopping experience rather than loyalty bundles. That framing — Alibaba as something other than a Wal-Mart-style retailer — is the same beat the paper's commentators were pushing at the time.
The arc since then cuts both ways. Alibaba's dominance proved durable against Western entrants but eroded from within: eMarketer later tracked its China ecommerce share falling from ~78% in 2015 to ~51% by 2021 [[a:971906]], and Pinduoduo's gamified, social-first model [[a:964378]] shows the local competition Amazon faced was itself being disrupted. Notably, Alibaba has fared no better abroad than Amazon did in China, with international retail contributing only ~5% of revenue years after its IPO [[a:945888]].
First-order effects
- Amazon's China operation remains marginal despite Prime, leaving Alibaba and JD.com to fight each other rather than a foreign challenger for Chinese shoppers.
Second-order effects
- With Amazon not a credible threat, Alibaba's defensive energy went toward JD.com and domestic upstarts — locking in exclusive brand deals with names like Timberland and Decathlon to wall off supply [[a:831979]] — while later ceding share to PDD's cheaper, more interactive formats.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to a structurally bifurcated global ecommerce market: neither Amazon in China nor Alibaba overseas could carry its home-market model across borders, suggesting scale and logistics advantages are locally contingent rather than exportable.
The trend: China's ecommerce market consistently rewards locally built deal-and-experience models over imported loyalty programs, keeping foreign platforms near zero share even as domestic leaders rotate among themselves.