yStats.com, a leading secondary market research company based in Hamburg, Germany, has published a new market report “China B2C E-Commerce Sales Forecasts: 2017 to 2021”. The report synthesizes predictions of multiple original sources and concludes that online retail sales in China are expected to maintain double-digit growth rates and reach the 1 trillion Euro milestone within the next few years.
China is the world’s largest B2C E-Commerce market, accounting for a double-digit share of global online sales. More than half a billion people shop online in China, with the E-Commerce share of total retail sales reaching twice as high as the global average. Within the next few years, China is expected to set a new record by generating E-Commerce sales of over 1 trillion Euros, including B2C and C2C online retail. Five out of six original sources cited in the yStats.com publication concur with this prediction, although disagree on the specific year when this milestone will be reached. Another common projection is the decline of year-on-year growth rates over the forecast period compared to the previous years due to increased maturity of the market, although the compound annual growth rate in the period from 2016 to 2021 is still projected to remain in the double-digits.
Among the key drivers of the online retail sales growth in China is the rise of mobile shopping as the main mode of E-Commerce. In the first half of 2017, M-Commerce accounted for more than three-quarters of online retail sales in China, according to several market estimates cited in the yStats.com report. The convenience of mobile shopping is expected to further spur the overall E-Commerce growth over the forecast period. Another major growth driver is the proliferation of online shopping in smaller cities and rural areas. Between 2015 and 2016, E-Commerce sales in rural China more than doubled, but still accounted for less than one-fifth of the nationwide online retail sales. Considering the significant proportion of China’s population living in rural areas, higher Internet and online shopper penetration rates combined with the expansion of delivery coverage of the major market players is projected to contribute to the E-Commerce boom.
