Ziniao: Aiming to Unlock the Seamless Potential of the Trillion-Dollar Global E-Commerce Market

【Ebrun Original】Since filing its IPO prospectus, Zixun Technology, the developer of Ziniao Browser, has closed a hundreds of millions of RMB Pre-IPO funding round, marking a new phase of global expansion and AI-powered product development.

The round was led by Guotai Haitong Private Equity, with participation from Cathay Capital, Fujian Provincial Government Investment Fund, and Fuzhou Jinrong Group. To date, Zixun Technology has secured backing from top-tier market-oriented venture firms including Gaorong Capital, IDG Capital, Hillhouse Capital’s Growth Capital arm, and Cathay Capital, as well as government guidance funds and securities firm-linked private equity investors.

01

The Trillion-Dollar Global E-Commerce Market Has a Persistent Security Pain Point

Global e-commerce represents a massive, high-growth market valued at over $1 trillion. Market research projects that global retail e-commerce sales will climb from $6.8 trillion in 2026 to nearly $8 trillion by 2028, accounting for more than 20% of total global retail sales. That translates to more than $1 trillion in incremental growth over two years, with an annual growth rate of around 7%.

Chinese sellers are the dominant supply-side force in this vast market.

This trend is clearly illustrated by key metrics.

On veteran platform Amazon, Chinese sellers made up over 50% of active sellers in 2025, and accounted for nearly 60% of new seller sign-ups.

On Mercado Libre, the leading e-commerce platform in Latin America, the number of Chinese sellers surged more than 100% over the past two years, with a target to grow that base tenfold over the next three years. For Russian e-commerce platform Ozon, monthly new sign-ups from Chinese sellers have reached 30,000 to 40,000 in the latest reporting period.

The cross-border e-commerce sector is now operating in a new cycle marked by rising deglobalization headwinds, regional geopolitical conflicts, and intensifying platform competition. For China’s manufacturing sector, which contributes roughly 30% of global manufacturing value added and has ranked first worldwide for consecutive years, full, resolute globalization is the only viable path forward.Operating across multiple platforms, regions, and separate storefronts to diversify risk has become standard practice for Chinese cross-border sellers.

Store accounts are sellers’ core digital asset and direct source of operating revenue; the security and stability of these accounts is existential for business survival.

In the early days of the industry, sellers often managed store credentials via Excel spreadsheets, a system plagued by low efficiency, high risk of data leaks, and poor cross-team collaboration, which led to a litany of operational failures.

There were cases of new employee missteps triggering platform enforcement actions and store bans; credential leaks allowing bad actors to remove all product listings from a store overnight; operational lapses causing major losses with no audit trail to trace accountability.

Yang Jinhe, founder of Ziniao Browser, spent nearly a decade as a frontline cross-border seller operating on Amazon, eBay, Shopee and other platforms. In 2017, Yang suffered a major credential security crisis: an employee, acting for personal gain, secretly delisted the company’s products, causing sudden, severe business disruption.

The incident prompted Yang to develop in-house management tools to mitigate this existential risk, leading to the launch of Ziniao Browser, as he pivoted from running e-commerce stores to building essential infrastructure for other sellers.

02

Multi-Store Operations Are an Inevitable Choice for Global E-Commerce Expansion

Ziniao is a tool built by sellers, for sellers.

Its core function is to address sellers’ needs for managing accounts across global platforms and multiple storefronts, including secured login environments, account hosting, role-based access control, and full operation audit trails.

Discussions of multi-store management touch on a unique dynamic in the cross-border e-commerce sector, which once led to Ziniao being inaccurately labeled as a tool to evade platform rules.

In the early years of the industry, most cross-border sellers relied on a mass listing, high-volume store strategy; publicly listed sellers including Savime Times, Huakai Yibai, Suntang, and Zibuyu built scale by operating large networks of stores to boost product visibility and reduce the risk of arbitrary account suspensions. At their peak, these top-tier sellers competed on the size of their store networks (often thousands of storefronts) and SKU catalogs (in the millions).

Subsequently, to prevent dominant sellers from crowding out smaller merchants, platforms tightened store opening rules, strictly enforcing a policy of one store per business entity, with harsh, collective penalties for violations: if one store or even one product listing under a business entity was found to be non-compliant, all other stores under that same entity could be shut down en masse. A single intellectual property complaint or malicious negative review could trigger a cascade of store closures.

Store closures lead to business interruption, frozen funds, and stranded inventory. Lengthy platform appeal processes, which often require weeks of back-and-forth email communication and documentation, leave sellers with little room to wait for resolution.

Guided by the principle of not putting all eggs in one basket, multi-platform, multi-store operations have become the new industry consensus.

Take brand-focused seller Anker Innovations as an example: it operates across all major mainstream e-commerce platforms online, runs a network of direct-to-consumer brand websites, and sells through offline channels including Walmart, forming a full-funnel, multi-store, omnichannel layout.

Multi-store operations are an inevitable choice for sellers to mitigate risks in global operations, rather than a tactic to circumvent platform rules. Today, demand for store management tools like Ziniao is not driven by a desire to “evade platform oversight,” but by the need for compliant, efficient management of cross-border, multi-platform store networks at global scale.

In fact, Ziniao Browser maintains strong collaborative relationships with all major cross-border e-commerce platforms. According to its prospectus, Ziniao is integrated with more than 140 mainstream e-commerce platforms worldwide, and has been certified as an outstanding ecosystem partner by multiple platforms.

In the era of global e-commerce, managing multiple stores across different platforms located in various countries and regions is a complex task.

Each store on each platform requires a unique set of linked phone number, email address, and credit card, meaning dozens of stores translate to dozens of separate sets of login credentials. Operations teams need to log into platform backends frequently to manage listings, creating demand for a high-efficiency tool.

Ziniao Browser integrates login access for all major platform backends, eliminating repetitive steps of retrieving credentials and logging in across accounts, while also preventing login credential leaks.

Notably, 65% of Ziniao’s paid subscribers only operate a single store; their core need is not multi-store management, but tiered access control for different operational roles within their team.

03

The Second Growth Curve: A One-Stop AI Agent for Global E-Commerce Operations

According to disclosures from Zixun Technology’s latest funding round, the company’s next phase of development will focus on building a vertical e-commerce large language model, developing AI agents, and recruiting top algorithm talent. The core vehicle for this strategy is LinkFox, the AI-powered e-commerce application platform launched in 2023.

E-commerce is an ideal use case for AI adoption: functions including video and graphic content production, product detail page generation, customer service, and loyalty marketing all hold massive potential for AI-driven productivity gains.

A recent survey released by Amazon Global Selling found that more than 98% of surveyed Chinese sellers already use AI tools, with 16% having moved beyond single-point AI tools to deploy AI workflows or agents capable of automating multi-task processing. For complex operational decisions including pricing, product selection, and inventory replenishment, AI is codifying judgments that once relied heavily on individual operator experience into reusable, standardized skills.

Currently, the AI operations tool market is crowded with single-point solutions, but there is a gap in the market for integrated AI products that support end-to-end operational workflows. Leveraging its advantage as a browser-based entry point for sellers, Zixun Technology has integrated core cross-border e-commerce operational workflows including product research, market analysis, content creation, product detail page optimization, and post-launch performance analysis.

Per the company’s prospectus, LinkFox had nearly 40,000 paid subscribers in 2025. While its share of total revenue remains small, it has posted a compound annual growth rate of 526%.

With a founding team made up of former e-commerce sellers, Zixun Technology designs its AI products with a focus on real operational performance. The company notes that LinkFox’s training data draws from top-selling products across mainstream platforms, so AI-generated images are tailored to high-conversion e-commerce use cases, rather than generic aesthetically pleasing visuals. As of the end of May 2026, LinkFox users had submitted more than 85 million AI image generation requests.

On the monetization front, LinkFox has expanded beyond subscription pricing to offer token-based pay-as-you-go API access, diversifying the company’s revenue mix.

LinkFox represents the second growth curve built on top of Ziniao Browser, with strong synergies between the two products.

The cloud service infrastructure and store network Ziniao has built over the past decade provide a stable hardware foundation and continuous flow of data to power AI development, while LinkFox expands beyond core account management to cover new store service scenarios including product sourcing, supplier matching, compliance checks, listing content creation (copy, images, video), promotional campaign management, and inventory tracking, unlocking new growth potential.

Amid the sweeping AI wave, many vertical cross-border e-commerce service providers are pursuing AI transformation; LinkFox connects ecosystem partners via agent skills and connectors to create a one-stop source of AI productivity tools for sellers.

04

From Serving Chinese Sellers to Serving Global Sellers: Making Global Commerce Simpler

Per its prospectus, Zixun Technology holds a 30.2% market share in China’s e-commerce security operation products segment, ranking first in the category, and ranks fourth among all full-suite e-commerce SaaS providers with a 4.5% market share.

In 2025, the company recorded revenue of 687 million RMB and operating profit of 257 million RMB, with 415,600 paid subscribers. Its monthly subscription renewal rate has remained above 90% for three consecutive years, with a net revenue retention rate of over 117%.

Zixun Technology has no obvious direct comparable in the domestic Chinese market, but globally, Israel-based Island offers a useful benchmark. Also an enterprise browser built on Chromium, Island focuses on enterprise account management, access control, operation audit trails, and data loss prevention, serving clients across sectors including finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.

To date, Island has raised $1 billion across six funding rounds from top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Insight Partners, and J.P. Morgan, reaching a valuation of $6 billion.

Enterprise browsers, represented by Island and Zixun Technology, have become a fast-growing niche market segment. As leading players in the space accelerate IPO timelines, the category is expanding beyond its initial vertical use cases into new scenarios.

Zixun Technology, for example, has served a cumulative total of 8 million storefronts, delivering strong results in the cross-border e-commerce vertical. But amid the dual opportunities of global e-commerce growth and AI agent adoption, expanding to serve overseas sellers operating global businesses represents a far larger market opportunity.

The new era of globalization is defined by interconnected networks of buying and selling across borders: buyers are located all over the world, and so too are sellers. Data from China’s General Administration of Customs for the first half of 2026 shows that 140 million people in China have made cross-border e-commerce purchases from global sellers. Those global sellers serving Chinese buyers are also selling to markets worldwide, and equally need robust store management services.

An industry source revealed that Zixun Technology aims to distill its successful experience serving domestic Chinese sellers and brands into reusable, scalable skills, to expand its client base to overseas Chinese sellers and local e-commerce sellers across global markets.

Ebrun Research notes three key dynamics shaping opportunity in the space: First, the global e-commerce market shows no signs of slowing, maintaining steady annual growth of around 7%; cross-border e-commerce is not only a new business model and format for China’s foreign trade, but for global trade as a whole. Second, Ziniao is already integrated with more than 140 mainstream e-commerce platforms worldwide; as e-commerce globalization drives both competition and collaboration, the number of platforms with e-commerce functionality is growing rapidly worldwide. At the same time, two persistent security concerns continue to impact the industry: volatility stemming from external geopolitical risks, and internal risks related to cross-platform, multi-store account management, which create non-negotiable, structural demand for cross-platform multi-store operation and management tools. Most notably, having served 8 million storefronts to date, Zixun Technology is positioned at the intersection of the global e-commerce and AI agent opportunities: building a complete intelligent ecosystem for store operations to enable simple, efficient management of global storefronts and global business is both the core mission and growth opportunity for companies building the digital operations infrastructure for global e-commerce.

Ebrun will continue to track developments in this space. For more related content, scan the QR code to follow the author’s WeChat account.

This article was first published on the official website of Ebrun.