Alibaba Cloud Retail United States

ZKH

Marketing Personalization · Risk Management · Supply Chain Optimization

As ZKH expanded, new challenges emerged, requiring swift solutions to maintain its competitive edge. To meet its high-resilience demands, the company needed a robust infrastructure capable of supporting a multi-region setup and eliminating single points of failure. Additionally, its global expansion highlighted the need for a cloud provider that could guarantee fast, reliable communication between data centres worldwide.

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By using AI to deconstruct and optimize 16 scenarios and 120 sub-scenarios, ZKH has vastly enhanced operational efficiency and reduced costs.

Reported impact

Business outcome

ZKH has undergone a radical transformation, migrating its e-commerce platforms, payment processing, warehousing, logistics, and operations to Alibaba Cloud. This shift has enabled the company to overcome key challenges in platform performance, resource scalability, and data security, further strengthening its competitive edge. By leveraging Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model to train its own LLM, ZKH has vastly reduced RFQ time, propelling it to the forefront of MRO industry innovation. Building on this successful partnership, ZKH has expanded its operations beyond APAC, fulfilling its mission to spearhead the digital transformation of the MRO industry.

Solution

ZKH used Alibaba Cloud to address As ZKH expanded, new challenges emerged, requiring swift solutions to maintain its competitive edge. To meet its high-resilience demands, the company needed a robust infrastructure capable of supporting a multi-region setup and eliminating single points of failure. Additionally, its global expansion highlighted the need for a cloud provider that could guarantee fast, reliable communication between data centres worldwide. ZKH Group Limited (ZKH), a leader in maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) procurement, is on a mission to revolutionize the industrial supplies industry. By embracing digital transformation, ZKH has modernized legacy services and scaled its operations to meet the demands of a global marketplace. Founded in China in 1998, ZKH has revolutionized the procurement process with its cost-effective and time-efficient digital platform, enabling customers to quickly and easily find products and services.

Data flow

ZKH's workloads and source data are processed on Qwen, Model Studio, Elastic Compute Service, Container Service for Kubernetes persist to MaxCompute, PolarDB with security and operations controls from Certificate Management Service.

Solution architecture

10 components · 5 layers

Compute
- Qwen In 2024, ZKH began building its own industrial supplies industry model by utilizing Alibaba Cloud's open-source Qwen
- Model Studio Additionally, ZKH used the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio platform to directly access the commercial version of the Qwen (Qwen-Max) LLM, focusing on enhancing human-machine
- Elastic Compute Service ZKH implemented Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), and Service Mesh (ASM), enabling the expansion of cloud computing applications and AI
Storage
- MaxCompute ZKH then adopted MaxCompute, which allowed for the efficient querying of large data sets and further streamlining the customer service
- PolarDB PolarDB separated computing and storage resources, providing ZKH with secure, high-performance, rapid auto-scaling
Orchestration
- Container Service for Kubernetes ZKH implemented Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), and Service Mesh (ASM), enabling the expansion of cloud computing applications and AI
Governance
- Certificate Management Service To safeguard customer information, ZKH leveraged Alibaba Cloud's Certificate Management Service (SSL), which encrypts data transmission, verifies trusted IP addresses, and
Uncategorized
- Object Storage Service Next ZKH leveraged Alibaba Cloud's industry-leading Object Storage Service (OSS) to efficiently store, safeguard, and access the extensive data generated by its MRO procurement
- Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) To support its overseas expansion across APAC and the United States, ZKH implemented Cloud Enterprise Network, enabling efficient management of its international cloud resource
- Service Mesh ZKH implemented Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), and Service Mesh (ASM), enabling the expansion of cloud computing applications and AI

Architecture clues

By leveraging Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model to train its own LLM, ZKH has vastly reduced RFQ time, propelling it to the forefront of MRO industry innovation
In 2024, ZKH began building its own industrial supplies industry model by utilizing Alibaba Cloud's open-source Qwen model
Primary customer region: United States
Running on multiple ECS GPU Instances, ZKH fine-tuned and trained this Large Language Model (LLM) with its own e-commerce data to create a specialized expert model for its daily MRO scenarios
ZKH implemented Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), and Service Mesh (ASM), enabling the expansion of cloud computing applications and AI without sacrificing efficiency

Evidence from the source

Additionally, its global expansion highlighted the need for a cloud provider that could guarantee fast, reliable communication between data centres worldwide.

As ZKH expanded, new challenges emerged, requiring swift solutions to maintain its competitive edge.

This partnership enabled seamless resource allocation across its e-commerce, supply chain, and logistics operations.

To keep pace with evolving resource demands, ZKH turned to Alibaba Cloud for innovative, scalable solutions.

To meet its high-resilience demands, the company needed a robust infrastructure capable of supporting a multi-region setup and eliminating single points of failure.

Transparency Evidence & methodology 85/100 reference value · 79% confidence · 1 source

Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.

Scoring methodology

How scores are calculated

Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.

Customer reference value85/100

Problem clarity20/20
Measures whether the customer's operational problem is specific enough to compare.
Implementation depth20/25
Rewards named components, data flow, integrations, and architecture detail.
Outcome specificity20/20
Measures whether the reported benefit is concrete rather than a generic claim.
Quantified impact15/25
1 metric describe measurable impact.
Deployment scale10/10
Rewards evidence of a live or scaled deployment and meaningful integration scope.

Evidence confidence79%

Source authority20/25
The main evidence is an official vendor-published customer story.
Claim traceability21/25
10 of 12 key fields link to a named source.
Direct evidence20/20
5 direct source quotes retained.
Date provenance0/10
The publication date has no documented provenance.
Source transparency8/10
1 source reference document publisher, URL, authority, retrieval, and supported fields.
Implementation specificity10/10
Rewards source-backed components, data flow, quantified impact, and a specific outcome.

Traceability

Sources & provenance

Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.

Alibaba Cloud
ZKH customer story

First-party
https://www.alibabacloud.com/customers/zkh

Source type
Vendor-published customer story
Supports
- Customer
- Business problem
- Solution
- Products
- Solution components
- Data flow
- Integrations
- technical area
- use case category
- Business outcome
- outcome category
- Metrics
- Architecture
- evidence quotes

Date evidence

First archived Oct 24, 2025 · Internet Archive · Independent First Wayback Machine capture; confirms the page existed by this date, not when it was published.
Open date source

Not separately sourced Industry, Region, Company size. Treat these normalized attributes as lower-confidence until a dedicated source is added.

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