yStats.com, a leading secondary market research company, based in Germany and specialized in E-Commerce and Online Payment markets, has released a major publication titled “Global B2C E-Commerce Market 2016.” The report contains a comprehensive overview of online retail market developments, trends, and forecasts worldwide. The publication reveals that selected advanced B2C E-Commerce markets show first signs of maturity, such as declining growth rates, while emerging markets continue to grow rapidly.
The B2C E-Commerce market maintains growth on the global scale, according to the report by yStats.com. Various sources cited in the publication project that B2C E-Commerce sales will top USD 1 trillion in 2016, while differing in predictions of exactly how much sales will surpass that figure. Although the global growth rate is projected to moderate within the next few years, emerging markets still show high growth potential. The developing nations in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa especially are predicted to stand out in terms of growth, with their share of global B2C E-Commerce market increasing through 2019.
The untapped potential of emerging B2C E-Commerce markets stems from growing Internet and online shopper penetration. In five years to 2015, the number of Internet users in Asia and the Middle East grew by a high double-digit percentage and in Africa the growth was in a three-digit range, according to the yStats.com report findings. There is further room for growth, as Internet penetration rates in Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Africa were still below the global median, as of last year. Moreover, while online shopper penetration is already at over two-thirds of the population in advanced B2C E-Commerce markets such as the UK, Germany and South Korea, in many emerging economies this rate is still low at two-digit or even one-digit percentage shares. As newly connected individuals discover the advantages of online purchases, three out of the top five countries by number of online shoppers are predicted to be from the emerging Asia by 2019.
Some of the most important B2C E-Commerce market trends, covered in the yStats.com report on the global, regional and country levels include M-Commerce, cross-border shopping, social commerce and omnichannel. The varying preferences of online shoppers around the world with regard to product categories, payment and delivery methods are also revealed. Furthermore, the report shows that on global average, online marketplaces were slightly more likely to be purchased from than retailers’ websites in 2015. Some of the largest online retailers by global sales included Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and JD.com, while there are multiple local leaders on regional and country levels.
