A new report by Hamburg-based secondary market research company yStats.com, “China B2C E-Commerce Sales Forecasts: 2015 to 2018”, highlights the growth prospects of the world’s largest online shopping market. According to the research, the main question is not whether B2C E-Commerce in China will surpass the one trillion dollar mark, but when.
China has become the world’s largest online retail market in terms of sales, topping advanced markets such as the USA, the UK and Japan, if one takes the sum of B2C and C2C E-Commerce sales. It is also the fastest growing of the top ten markets by sales, outpacing other emerging countries, such as Russia and Brazil, to which it is oft-compared. As this trend persists, China’s share of online retail sales worldwide will grow to more than one-third within the next few years.
While major primary research sources forecast different growth rates and volumes for the Chinese retail E-Commerce market, all of them tend to agree on one prediction: online retail sales in China will grow rapidly at double-digit rates in the next several years. Another prediction common among the sources which include both B2C and C2C transactions is that the online shopping market in China will top 1 trillion dollars, though they vary in projecting the exact year when this will occur.
China’s booming online shopping market is supported by the country’s vast population, which is the largest in the world, coupled with increasing Internet and mobile Internet penetration and growing interest of Internet users in online shopping. As more consumers opt for buying online, the share of online retail compared to total retail sales is growing. Cross-border E-Commerce is among the most important trends, but foreign players wishing to take advantage of China’s online shopping boom should be aware of the dominance of the largest home-grown online retail platforms: Tmall of Alibaba Group and JD.com, which both held international IPOs last year.
