Online retail sales in China has been soaring since 2006.However, the growth started to decelerate to less than 50%in 2013, then to below 40% for the first time in 2015 andeven to 26.2% in 2016.
Surprisingly, the first nine monthsof this year saw a new surge of online retail sales with a growth speed of 34.2%, which was much higher than that of 2015 or 2016.
During the 12 months from October 2016 to September 2017, China’s online retail sales reached almost RMB 6.6 trillion, an increase of 38% compared to the previous cycle and the highest level on record. In particular, the online retail sales of physical commodities was about RMB 5.08 trillion and of services about RMB 1.49 trillion, accounting for 13.6% of total commodities retail sales in China, which showed an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the same period last year.
According to recent statistics, the number of China’s netizens reached 751 million by June 2017, accounting for 54.3% of China’s population. With such a large number of internet users, it is no wonder that many people shop online. At the same time, the number of people shopping online ascended to 514 million, which increased by 10.2% compared with that in January 2017, when the online shopping penetration was 68.5%.
Cross border e-commerce has become the main driving force of foreign trade growth in China
In recent years, China’s e-commerce has reached its hands to overseas markets, not only taking domestic products to the world but also bringing foreign goods into the China market in a fast way.
The statistics from China’s Ministry of Commerce show that the trade scale of cross border e-commerce reached RMB 3.6 trillion in the first half of 2017, up by 30.7% compared to the same period last year, among which the export scale accounted for RMB 2.75 trillion and the import RMB 862.4 billion. With the fact that the average annual growth rate of e-commerce retail export has been as high as 60% from 2013 to 2016, it is fair to say that cross border e-commerce has become a key driving force for China’s foreign trade growth.
China’s e-commerce reaches every corner of the world. Now AliExpress’s business has already covered 230 countries, with the US, EU, and ASEAN being top export destinations. In terms of export channel, Amazon has overwhelmingly dominated the market with the value of Chinese goods exported through Amazon amounting to over RMB 300 billion in 2016.
How about the acceptance of China’s e-commerce platforms in other countries? In Russia, AliExpress has become the most visited e-commercial website and half of the cross-border online shopping business of Russia is done with China. Three of the top four e-commerce platform giants--except Amazon--in Southeast Asia are invested by China.
China: the biggest e-commerce economy in the world
If you ask which country has the strongest e-commerce market, I would say it must be China. China’s e-commerce is large in scale, accounting for 40% of the global market shares. Its online shopping scale (service excluded) ascended to USD 750 billion in 2016, which was much more than the total amount of the following three countries on the list—US (USD 312.1 billion), UK (USD 150 billion), and Japan (USD 90 billion).
Does that mean that Chinese netizens shop the most in the world? The answer is negative. In fact, it is British netizens who shop the most.
In 2016, each British netizen spent USD 3,456.22 on average on online shopping. The next is French netizens, as each of them spent USD 1,925. The most things they bought were clothes, which is true to France’s reputation as a country of fashion. Then are most online shoppers young people? It is the case in most countries, but not in Germany, where most of the online shoppers are middle-aged and elderly people. According to a survey, the main force of online shopping in Germany is constituted by the population aged 24 to 54, and the elderly aged over 55 accounts for 34.2% of its total online shoppers. However, conservative Germans don’t like mobile payment, with only no more than 7% of them having ever tried it.
Which country has the highest proportion of online shoppers? It is South Korea. South Korea has a population of 5.062 million, among which 3.5 million people shop online, accounting for 69.1% of the whole population. In South Korea, “every citizen is a netizen”.
Market-research firm eMarketer predicted that smart phone users in South Korea would account for 72.2% of its total population in 2017. In addition, in Korea, online necessities shopping accounted for 16.6% of sales, ranking the first among major countries and regions in the world.
The development of various e-commerce forms in the US is more balanced. Its comprehensive e-commerce platforms, offline retailer e-commerce platforms and branded vertical e-commerce platforms have been well developed.
The cross-border e-commerce is highly accepted. More than half of US e-merchants obtain orders from abroad, and 39% of US consumers buy from China. But its e-commerce providers are still facing a big challenge, i.e., the courier costs generally ranging from $ 5-30
is too high for them.
