PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report on April 8 2014, which found out that Chinese consumers ran ahead of global consumers in online shopping, especially in mobile shopping.
The PWC report interviewed 15,000 online consumers, covering 15 regions including Brazil, Canada, mainland China and Hong Kong, France, India and Middle East.
According to the report, 14% Chinese respondents said they did online shopping everyday. More than 60% Chinese claimed they shopped online at least once a week, much higher than global average of 5% online shopping everyday and 21% every week. In mobile shopping, Chinese consumers still ranked the number one. 4% of Chinese respondents said they used mobile shopping everyday, 20% used it once a week and 27% once a month. While the global percentages were 2%, 7% and 12% respectively.
The report also discovered that Chinese consumers used more of smartphone. Except for using smartphone for phone call, news, weather, search, GPS and SNS, other functions tended to be more popular among Chinese consumers such as online shopping and content consumption. 71% Chinese used mobile shopping, while only 32% Americans did; 37% Chinese used smartphone for dining reservation, while the percentage in America was only 13%; 35% Chinese purchased stock using smartphone, while only 5% Americans did.
Another interesting finding was that Chinese consumers were more likely to accept mobile payment. In 2013, Square, paypal and tenpay’s total transaction reached 124 billion yuan (USD 20.11 billion), 167 billion yuan (USD 27.09 billion) and 52 billion yuan (USD 8.45 billion) respectively. Alipay ranked the top with 906 billion yuan (USD 146.97 billion) in global mobile payment transaction. In 2013, the total mobile payment transaction in China reached 1220 billion yuan (USD 197.9 billion), it expected to reach 2941 billion yuan (USD 477.07 billion) in 2014 and 5257 billion yuan (USD 852.75 billion) in 2015.