Chinese Consumers Focus on Four Sites for Online Shopping

A recent Statista Consumer Insights survey shows that Chinese consumers rely on domestic providers for online shopping. Chief among them is JD, where 61 percent of respondents have shopped at in the past 12 months, followed by Taobao (54 percent) and Tmall (51 percent), both of which are owned by Alibaba.

While Amazon is usually seen as the leading global e-commerce platform, it only plays a minor role in the People's Republic. 20 percent of respondents said they had ordered from the U.S. platform recently. Apart from Amazon, only two other foreign online shops feature among the 16 that survey respondents could choose from: Apple with ten percent and Sephora with eight percent.

In two cases, consumer preference also translates to successful economic performance. Taobao's and Tmall's parent company Alibaba generated a trailing twelve month revenue of $132.4 billion, according to Companies Market Cap. This performance netted it rank 53 out of the more than 9,000 global public companies listed on the site. JD fared even better, cracking the global top 50 with $154 billion, making it the Chinese tech company with the highest revenue, ranking 40th worldwide. So even with most of the products sold on Amazon manufactured in China according to a recent seller survey by Amazon seller software Jungle Scout, the People's Republic's residents put more stock into homegrown alternatives.