Improving technology has supported a good environment for China’s consumers to shop online and pick up cross-border products at home. 36% China’s online shoppers bought cross-border products in 2015 according to Paypal.
China’s consumers have been gradually entering the international e-commerce market. 81% of China internet users once shopped online in the past 12 months according to Paypal and the ratio was 80% in 2014. 32% of China’s online shoppers bought domestic and cross-border products and 4% bought cross-border products only in 2015.
China’s online shoppers prefer making purchases on mobile devices. 53% cross-border purchases were made on desktops, laptops, and notebooks, 27% were made on smartphones, and 14% on tablets.
China’s cross-border online consumers relatively preferred large global stores such as Amazon to buy overseas products and language sometimes was a barrier for them compared to other countries such as US and India.
Freight forwarding was most popular in China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. The incidence of sending returns cross-border in China was the second highest globally.
12% internet users in China sent money to friends of families in another country in 2015. Some cross-border online shoppers made payment by PayPal mainly because of lower charged fees.
Statistics of China E-Commerce Research Center showed that China’s cross-border e-commerce transaction size reached 2 trillion yuan (US$0.31 trillion) with an increase of 42.8% YoY, accounting for 17.3% of total imports and exports sales in H1 2015. Cross-border export e-commerce accounted for 84.8% and the import accounted for 15.2%.
Nearly 88% of the second-tier city consumers bought cross-border goods online according to Nielsen. The number of China’s cross-border online shoppers is expected to reach 35.6 million in 2018 which will total 1 trillion yuan (US$0.15 trillion) basing on CECRC. These data prove that cross-border e-commerce market in China deserves huge prospects.
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