Ikea started selling its products on Alibaba’s Tmall platform Tuesday, the first time for the Swedish furniture giant to market through a third party.

Ikea said its flagship store on Tmall will initially serve consumers in three eastern provinces ― Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui ― and the city of Shanghai, and will gradually expand to the rest of the country.

Ikea is starting with those four areas as it has more brick-and-mortar stores in eastern China and e-commerce is more developed in these regions, said Anna Pawlak-Kuliga, CEO and president of Ikea China.

The Tmall store will offer around 3,800 products, or about 40% of the 9,500 products Ikea sells in its own offline stores. Most of the products sold in the Tmall store are popular items.

Ikea temporarily shut all of its 33 stores in China in late January in response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The company said as of Monday it reopened 16 stores in China and planned to reopen 12 more Wednesday.

Contact reporter Denise Jia (huijuanjia@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com)