How AliExpress Brand+ Routed Around the EU's New Tariff Wall

AliExpress's brand-building arm for Chinese exporters, Brand+, says its EU sales jumped 97% year over year in August, even as a new EU tariff regime took effect. The number is platform-reported, not independently audited, and Brand+ is using it to frame its appearance this week at IFA, the Berlin consumer-electronics trade show. The growth came mostly from two structural moves, not from price cuts: goods shipped from inside the EU, which sidestep the new cross-border parcel duty bucket, and a heavier mix of higher-ticket SKUs where the duty is a smaller share of the price. That playbook is exportable to other Chinese consumer brands trying to clear the same wall.

Brand+ is the program AliExpress launched a year ago to give Chinese name-brand sellers a dedicated storefront, marketing muscle, and overseas logistics. The roster now spans more than 1,500 brands, including Xiaomi, Honor, Unitree, Anker, Li-Ning, and Pop Mart, according to PR Newswire's release and the Chinese trade-press coverage. The category the platform is leaning on hardest is AI hardware, which the company says grew 100% year over year in the first seven months of the year.

Two things changed for Chinese sellers shipping into the EU in 2026. First, the de minimis rule, the duty-free threshold that let low-value parcels enter the EU, ended for most cross-border e-commerce shipments, so packages arriving from outside the bloc now face the full duty. Second, intra-EU shipments from a fulfillment warehouse already inside the bloc are treated as domestic moves and skip that cross-border bucket. Brand+ spent the past year moving stock into EU-based official warehouses, and it plans to open a German official warehouse in mid-September, which it estimates will cut warehousing and distribution costs by 10%. When a package ships from a German shelf, it is no longer in the cross-border bucket Chinese sellers have been routing around.

The second mechanism is the SKU mix. The platform's August EU growth of 97%, plus a separate platform-reported 100% year-over-year jump in the AI-hardware category for the first seven months of the year, point to the same pattern: name-brand Chinese sellers are shipping higher-ticket goods, where the duty is a smaller share of the price. A flat-rate EU duty on a €500 robot vacuum (about $550 at current exchange rates) is a manageable slice of the price; the same duty on a €20 phone case (about $22) eats the entire gross margin. Brand+ also says it has crossed 50% brand-sales penetration in 11 European countries, including Germany, France, and Poland. The penetration figure is platform-reported, with no methodology disclosed.

Brand+ is using IFA, the Berlin consumer-electronics trade show, as a coming-out moment for the model. The platform is the only cross-border e-commerce name from the so-called "出海四小龙," the industry's catchall label for SHEIN, Temu, TikTok Shop, and AliExpress, to take a stage on the Berlin show floor, according to Chinese trade-press coverage. Nine Chinese brands are in tow: cleaning-appliance maker ILIFE, 3D-printer brand ANYCUBIC, e-bike vendor ENGWE, biomimetic flapping-wing-drone maker 鹰瞰智翼, mini-PC vendor 极摩客, and pool-cleaning-robot brand Seauto. Alibaba's Qwen AI glasses and clip-on AI earbuds are on stage. The earbuds are tuned with Bose and pitched by the manufacturer as supporting real-time cross-language interpretation. Brand+ used the show to announce three capability upgrades: full-funnel marketing extended to the U.S., South Korea, and Brazil; AI operations tools for selection, pricing, and multilingual content; and the German warehouse. Booth partners include Google, AMD, German ad group JVM, cashback platform Payback, affiliate network Awin, and price-comparison site idealo, a mix that mirrors the infrastructure Chinese cross-border platforms typically assemble to look credible on a European stage.

Storing stock inside the EU means capital tied up in slower-moving categories, a forex exposure, and a new regulatory surface, since EU authorities are now scrutinizing the local-warehouse route as a way for non-EU sellers to dodge the new tariff wall. Cheap-SKU categories, where the duty is a large share of the price, do not get the same lift. And the headline numbers, 97% in August, 100% in AI hardware, 50%-plus penetration in 11 countries, all come from the company selling the story.

The German official warehouse opens in mid-September, which will be the first clean test of whether the model scales.