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Understanding the Marketplace Behind the Name If you’ve spent time researching cross-border e-commerce platforms, you’ve probably noticed that DHgate tends to generate more questions than most. It’s one of the oldest China-to-global online marketplaces—founded in 2004—and yet its brand sits in a strange middle ground: widely used, heavily searched, occasionally misunderstood. Part of that comes from how the platform is structured. DHgate is not a retailer. It’s a marketplace, similar in spirit to Amazon Marketplace or AliExpress, that connects thousands of independent suppliers—many of them manufacturers or factory-adjacent wholesalers—to international...