Alibaba is the largest e-commerce site in China with sales more than twice that of Amazon. It's now being reported by many sites including those in China that Alibaba began offering an English-language portal on Tmall for the first time on Wednesday to entice more merchants from around the world to sell to Chinese consumers.

Alibaba is counting on the initiative to help double the number of foreign brands on Tmall Global to 40,000 in three years, said Yi Qian, deputy general manager of the service, which caters to buyers of foreign goods.

Yi said in an interview that "The website will widen our reach to merchants, especially to those medium and small sized businesses around the world. We will help them with our logistics and marketing services. We believe the launch of this English-language website will expedite the process for brands and merchants to introduce their products to Chinese consumers."

Yi added that "Tmall’s new portal allows English-speaking merchants to fill in details online about their products. Alibaba then vets them based on category and quality, and will contact merchants within 72 hours to gauge if their products are a fit. Previously, such sellers could only join Tmall through personal introduction, or by signing up at trade fairs. Other foreign-language versions of the website are in the works, including Spanish, Japanese and Korean."

Alibaba is seeking new growth engines to offset a cooling economy at home as the trade war rages on, while fending off increasingly aggressive competitors including JD.com Inc. and Pinduoduo Inc. Billionaire co-founder Jack Ma had set a goal of generating more than half of the company’s revenue from outside of China by 2025.

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