China mobile shopping market reached 167.64 billion yuan (USD 27.459 billion) in 2013, with 165.4% YoY growth. The market kept increasing rapidly under the circumstance of a better network coverage system and higher mobile terminal penetration. In the same period, the size of online shopping by PC is nearly 1600 billion yuan (USD 262.08 billion), with a 35.7% YoY growth. The market size was predicted to get close to a trillion with a growth rate of 39.4% in 2017, according to iResearch.
It is regarded that the trend of mobile internet was overwhelming, and mobile shopping was gradually becoming the first choice of online shopping. The rapid increase of mobile shopping benefited from following reasons. For one thing, traditional E-commerce giants emphasized developing the customers’ habit of using mobile. They enhanced the user experience, increased mobile promotion input, and launched mobile-special activities on Double 11, i.e. the shopping carnival created first by Tmall.
Taobao app, released mobile-user-only “red-envelops” (cash coupons) , Jingdong, Yixun (51buy), Suning also released special coupon to mobile users, encouraging more mobile users. On the day of Double 11(November 11) in 2013, the mobile Taobao transaction amount paid by Alipay reached 5.35 billion yuan (USD 876.32 million), and the user-frequency per day of mobile Taobao reached 1.27 billion times increasing by 457.3% compared to last year.
For another thing, as China’s network coverage system was maturing, more users of smartphones and tablets were starting to make use of the fragmentary time, and shopping became a good choice. In the meantime, the growth of online shopping by PC slowed down, and the mobile market rose to a growth point of E-commerce, attracting more E-commerce enterprises to pursue the mobile market share.
According to the statistical data of iResearch, China mobile shopping penetration was 9.1% in 2013, with a YoY growth of over 4 percentage points. It’s predicted to reach 24.1% in 2017.
Analysts regarded that the subsequent increase of mobile shopping penetration in the next few years was owed to the mature of the upstream and downstream of mobile shopping chain, and the better layout of mobile and the more promotion carried out by traditional E-commerce.
Here are several trends of future mobile shopping market. One is mobile end access diversification,Wechat payment showed the potential of IM market other than traditional E-commerce app and wap websites. Yixin, released by NetEase and China telecom, Alibaba’s Laiwang and other IMs tried to catch users’ eye by offering free mobile data traffic. New WeChat 5.0 added payment function and joined up with Yixun.com to make shopping all by WeChat possible.
Another trend is more cooperation with telecommunication operators. Taobao announced to cooperate with China Unicom, and released “free mobile data traffic” plan together. Some other E-commerce enterprises such as Suning and Jingdong also revealed the intention of cooperation with telecommunication operator to seize more consumers and market share.
As mobile terminal became more popular and the charge of mobile network decreased, mobile internet and shopping was broaden to tier-three or four cities and low-income groups. This is another trend of future mobile shopping market.