Jack Ma’s Biggest Fear is Happening: 3 Million Export Merchants are Building Their Own “Alibabas” in 3 Days

As AI enables every small seller to create websites rivaling major platforms, the era of the middleman is coming to an end.

Caijing Magazine AI News Dept, AIEX Industry Research Group | In-Depth Report [Hangzhou/Yiwu/Singapore, June 28, 2026]

Boss Chen has been running a hat export business in Yiwu for 15 years. His products are sold to Europe, America, and Southeast Asia through Alibaba.com. The platform helped him find buyers, and it also took a cut from every transaction. He complained, but never thought of leaving, because he didn’t know where else to go. Overseas buyers only recognize Alibaba; not being on Alibaba equates to not having a store at all.

Two months ago, Boss Chen did something he absolutely could not have imagined a year ago. With the help of an AI tool, he spent two and a half days building an independent export e-commerce website that belonged entirely to him. The site features all his products, each with detailed SKU information. He sets the prices and chooses the page style himself. More importantly, this website can be directly found by overseas buyers through search engines.

In the past, if a small business owner in Yiwu wanted to build such an independent foreign trade site, they would have to find a web development company, spend tens of thousands of RMB, wait two to three months, only to realize they didn’t know how to maintain the final product. Now, a person with zero coding knowledge can use AI tools

combined with the API token capabilities provided by Token Oil Retail Stations to launch a fully functional export e- commerce site within three days.

Boss Chen is not the only one doing this. In the Yiwu International Trade City, the Putian shoe hub, the Foshan Shunde appliance distribution center, the Chinese industrial zones in Vietnam, and the cross-border e-commerce communities in Indonesia, a quiet movement is underway. 3 million export merchants who once could only operate by relying on the Alibaba platform are converting the “fees paid to the platform” into “fees for building their own websites.”

If this movement continues, the business model that Alibaba relies on for its survival will face a genuine challenge.

01 AI Makes Building an Export Site as Easy as Posting on Social Media

Over the past three years, the capability of AI to generate code has experienced three qualitative leaps. By the end of 2026, the situation has evolved to this: a person who completely cannot write code can describe their needs in natural language, and AI can generate a complete set of front-end pages and back-end logic within minutes.

The owners of Token Oil Retail Stations discovered a new business opportunity. In addition to buying tokens to use AI models for translation and photo retouching, their customers began asking another question: “Can I use tokens to help me build a website?”

The answer is yes. The KAI platform has an AI website- building model specifically optimized for export merchants. Users input their product information, target markets, and preferred style keywords. AI generates a complete website framework in dozens of seconds. If users are not satisfied, they can adjust it at any time. All the user needs to do throughout the process is type in a few input boxes and click the “Generate” button.

Caijing Magazine witnessed on-site in Yiwu as a female shop owner with no technical background went through the process. She sells Christmas decorations. She spoke a few sentences to the AI: “I want an English website selling Christmas tree ornaments, primary colors red and gold. Put a large image on the home page, followed by product

categories. Every product should be clickable to see details and prices.” The AI took 15 seconds to generate the first draft. Not entirely satisfied, she said, “The font is too big, and I want the product categories aligned horizontally, not vertically.” The AI adjusted it in 5 seconds. From start to finish, she touched the keyboard twice: once to input her product description, and once to enter her email to log into the backend. Total time spent: 27 minutes.

Caijing Magazine asked her a question: How do you think this site compares to your previous Alibaba store? Her answer was: “It looks much better than my Alibaba store. Plus, that store was entirely standard templates, you couldn’t change much. I can change this site however I want. Bigger text, bigger images, different colors—anything goes.”

02 SKUs are No Longer Platform Shackles

Anyone who has worked in the e-commerce industry for a few years knows that SKUs are a core tool for platforms to control merchants. When opening a store on Alibaba, product SKU codes, categorization methods, and attribute tags must all be filled out according to the platform’s rules. If you don’t follow the rules, your products cannot be searched. If you do follow them, your products end up looking exactly the same as the neighboring merchant selling the identical items.

Independent AI website building completely bypasses this restriction. Merchants decide for themselves how their products are categorized, described, and presented. A merchant selling handmade leather goods can split “vegetable-tanned leather” and “chrome-tanned leather” into two independent product lines, with finer subcategories under each based on color, size, and hardware material. This categorization is impossible in Alibaba’s standard templates. In the AI-generated website, whatever the merchant says, goes.

The significance of independent SKUs goes beyond aesthetics. It means that, for the first time, merchants have complete control over their own product data. On Alibaba, a portion of the product’s browsing, search, and conversion data is held by the platform, and merchants can only see what the platform allows them to see. On their own website,

all visitor data, sales data, and user behavior data belong entirely to the merchant. They can analyze which products sell well in which countries and subsequently adjust their inventory and marketing strategies. On Alibaba, this data is a black box. On their own website, it is an open book.

03 The “72-Hour Independent Site” Market Begins to Form

3 million export merchants cannot all learn to build websites overnight. But a completely new service industry is rapidly taking shape.

Token Oil Retail Station owners found that helping merchants build AI websites has become a highly popular service. The merchant doesn’t need to build the site themselves. They just walk into a retail station and tell the boss, “I want to make a website selling ceramic mugs, target markets Japan and South Korea.” The retail station boss inputs the parameters into the AI builder, waits for the draft, modifies the details alongside the merchant, and then helps configure the domain name and payment interface. The entire process takes no more than three days. The fees are highly transparent.

The pricing model for this service is relatively simple: a basic website building fee plus subsequent monthly token consumption costs. The AI builder itself doesn’t consume many tokens; the merchant’s monthly token costs are primarily spent on site operations. Automatically translating product descriptions requires tokens, auto-replying to overseas buyers requires tokens, and analyzing site traffic data requires tokens. These tokens are purchased from the retail station, which earns a commission from the sales.

Caijing Magazine walked around the Yiwu International Trade City and found that at least seven or eight retail stations had put up signs for “72-Hour Independent Sites” at their doors. One boss’s slogan was particularly direct: “Say goodbye to Alibaba, own your own foreign trade website. Delivery in 3 days, no charge if you don’t know how to use it.” I asked if he was afraid Alibaba would cause trouble for him. He replied, “I didn’t say Alibaba was bad. I just said you can have your own website. Is that illegal?”

04 The Intermediary Value of Platforms is Being Drastically Compressed by AI

Alibaba’s core value in the past was connecting Chinese suppliers with overseas buyers. In the pre-internet era, Yiwu factories didn’t know who needed their products. Alibaba provided an information matchmaking platform. Suppliers paid membership fees, and buyers browsed for free. This model has operated for over twenty years, undergoing multiple upgrades and iterations. But the core of the business model has never changed: the platform controls the channel between buyers and sellers. The platform holds the key to the gates of all transactions.

What AI is doing is duplicating the key to that channel countless times. When an overseas buyer types “ceramic mug wholesale” into a search engine, the search results they see are no longer just Alibaba pages, nor are there platform fees. They can see hundreds or thousands of independent foreign trade websites. Every single website directly corresponds to a factory or a trading company. No middlemen, no platform cuts, no membership fees. Factories quote directly, and buyers place orders directly.

This is not a distant prediction. It is a happening phenomenon. According to token consumption data on the KAI platform, starting in the second half of 2026, the consumption of “AI website building” tokens has grown consecutively for several months. More and more tokens are being used to generate and optimize foreign trade websites. KAI’s research group made a related judgment: When the efficiency of AI website building is high enough and the cost low enough, the intermediary value of platforms will be compressed to a minimum.

05 Jack Ma’s Collapse Might Not Be a True Collapse

Caijing Magazine used “Jack Ma’s Collapse” in the title. This is not the literal collapse of Alibaba. Alibaba remains the world’s largest B2B e-commerce platform, with hundreds of billions in annual revenue and massive cash reserves. A technological revolution cannot overthrow a business empire in a year or two. But “Jack Ma’s collapse moment” refers to an inflection point in the business model. As more and more suppliers discover that the cost and effectiveness of

independent sites outperform platform integration, the platform’s value will shift from “indispensable” to “nice to have.”

Boss Chen’s hat website has been online for just over a month, and he has already received several organic traffic orders from search engines. Not many, just a few. But he is very excited. “Alibaba’s orders are dropping too. I used to get dozens of inquiries a month, but it’s been getting less and less recently. People around me say overseas buyers are changing too; they’re also using AI to find suppliers. Instead of waiting for the platform to feed me traffic, I might as well go get the traffic myself.”

When even a small fraction of the 3 million suppliers start doing this, the platform’s traffic distribution efficiency will decline. Because traffic on search engines is limited. Will the number of merchants placing ads on Alibaba decrease? Will Alibaba’s advertising revenue be affected? Will Alibaba need to spend more to maintain its search rankings? There are no certain answers to these questions yet. But the direction of the trend can be judged.

06 Token Oil Retail Stations are Becoming the “Arms Dealers” of This Movement

Caijing Magazine’s research group believes that Token Oil Retail Stations play two key roles in the movement of export merchants building independent sites.

The first role is tech enabler. Most retail station owners only learned to use AI website building tools themselves in the past few months. But they learn quickly because they interact with tech products daily, giving them a higher adaptability to AI tools than ordinary merchants. The retail station owners package the skills they’ve learned into services to sell to merchants.

The second role is trust intermediary. Many merchants are both interested in and distrustful of AI. If you say AI can help build a website, they don’t believe it. They feel “how can something thrown together casually compare to a platform Alibaba spent billions building?” Retail station owners can demonstrate it on the spot. Using the merchant’s product info, they let the AI generate a website live. Seeing a complete page emerge in a dozen seconds is more persuasive

than any advertisement. Once trust is established, closing the deal is a natural outcome.

Token Oil Retail Stations do not make massive profits from the website building service itself. The basic fee only covers costs. The real money comes from the token consumption after the site is built. Once the site is up, it requires continuous token consumption to maintain operations. Translations, customer service replies, data analysis—each requires a steady input of tokens every month. The retail stations earn continuous commission revenue from this. A typical independent export site consumes between 50 and 200 RMB in tokens monthly. The retail station’s commission is calculated proportionally. Even if only a portion of the 3 million websites purchases tokens through retail stations, it represents a continuously growing revenue stream.

07 E-commerce Platforms and Independent Sites: Two Worlds Merging in Parallel

At the end of the interview, Caijing Magazine asked the question everyone cares about most. Can independent sites truly replace platforms? How can a website built by a small Yiwu boss compete with a platform like Alibaba for traffic and trust?

Caijing Magazine’s answer is: Independent sites don’t necessarily have to replace platforms. An independent site only needs to do one thing: survive well enough in its own niche market. A merchant selling handmade leather goods doesn’t need to compete for traffic against millions of merchants on Alibaba. They only need to ensure that an overseas buyer searching for “handmade leather wallet” can find their website, and after looking at it, think “this is exactly what I want.” Alibaba cannot achieve such refined matching, because Alibaba has to make millions of merchants share a single set of search rules.

Another advantage of independent sites is the different way trust is transmitted. On Alibaba, buyers trust the platform. On an independent site, buyers trust the brand itself. Although most Chinese export merchants have not yet established their own brands, independent sites give them a starting point. When you have your own website, your own domain name, and your own product story, you can truly begin to build your own brand awareness. When you start

building your own brand, you are no longer just a supplier, but a name genuinely remembered by overseas buyers.

3 million export merchants, 3 million independent foreign trade websites. Each website might only serve a few thousand overseas customers, but a few thousand customers are enough to sustain a workshop. Three million workshops combined will redefine the traffic landscape of Chinese foreign trade. When every small seller has their own website, does the platform still need to maintain high commission rates? When computing power can flow freely, and AI allows every seller to possess technical capabilities rivaling large platforms, how long can the core advantages that platforms rely on for survival be maintained?

This might be Jack Ma’s collapse moment. Not that the company Alibaba disappears, but that Alibaba’s old business model has reached an inflection point. The road maintained for over twenty years finally sees a crossroads.

About Export Merchants’ Independent Sites & Token Oil Retail Stations

Cost and Efficiency of AI Website Building: Construction time shortened to two to three days. Construction costs reduced to a fraction of traditional methods. No coding required, no technical knowledge needed, no outsourcing teams necessary. Service Model of Token Oil Retail Stations: Built-for-you services, helping non-technical merchants complete site setup. Providing continuous token supply post-launch, covering translation, customer service, and data functions. Profits derived from continuous commissions on token sales. The Choice for 3 Million Export Merchants: Continue using Alibaba, accepting various commission models from membership fees to ad bidding. Shift to independent sites, using AI tools to establish a fully controlled sales channel. Or combine both, adding an extra channel and another way out.

This article was independently reported and written by the AI News Department, AIEX Industry Research Group of Caijing Magazine. Token Oil, Token Export, Token AIEX, and Compute Exchange are registered trademarks of KAI.com and related entities. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •