Chinese online retailer AliExpress has announced that it will soon set up depots in Israel. One of the purposes of the expansion is to shorten delivery times to three to seven days – compared to a month or longer, in present time – while also reducing product prices, which will reportedly concern a limited range of products to start, before being extended much more widely.

Currently, on the AliExpress website in Hebrew, customers can find a large sale of products with significant discounts, as promoted by the retailer, in order to mark the opening of the local warehouses. The official launch in Israel and the opening of the local warehouses will take place at the end of August. Israel is a growing market for the brand, as explained recently by its director of international development of the company in The Marker, cited by i24news.

tv. The company official detailed the fact that that sales in the Jewish state had grown very quickly, pushing AliExpress to gradually invest in marketing to the country's consumers. Moreover, according to i24news.

tv, Israel is only the fifth in the world to host AliExpress warehouses after Russia, the United States, Spain and Brazil. Jack Ma, the CEO of AliExpress’s parent company Alibaba, visited Israel in 2018, meeting with then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s payments and fintech market explained According to recent Statista figures, within Israel’s payments and fintech market online payments are the most prevalent, with a total transaction value of USD 19.

81 billion in 2022. In the digital payments segment, the number of users is expected to amount to 5. 85 million users by 2027, with a total transaction value projected at USD 19.

81 billion in 2022. According to ecommercedb. com, AliExpress will have shufersal.

co. il as a main competitor, it being the the biggest player in the Israeli ecommerce market, with USD 902 million in revenue over 2021. shufersal.

co. il is followed by shein. com and next.

co. il as the second- and third largest stores with USD 244 million and USD 178 million, respectively, according to the cited source. Altogether, the top three stores account for 20% of online revenue in Israel.

Other notable payments initiatives in Israel Apart from a rise in interest from the general public for ecommerce and digital payments, in 2021, Israel has begun the first stage in its Open Banking reform after directing banks to share information regarding their customers’ checking accounts, when requested to by the customer. Moreover, in June 2022, Israel's central bank has teamed up with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of International Settlements' (BIS) Innovation Lab to test the feasibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for retail. The test would be cyber-secured and in the proposed model, the intermediaries will have no financial exposure from customers holding or transferring CBDC, resulting in reduced risk and costs, as the bank said.

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