Number of online shoppers in China 2009-2020
E-commerce in China – additional information
The past decade has seen rapid growth in the demand for online shopping opportunities in China. The number of online shoppers in China has been increasing exponentially from below 34 million in 2006 to over 610 million users in 2018, enabling this enormous spurt of China’s e-commerce sector. As of 2017, digital buyer penetration rate in China has edged close to 45 percent.
China has been the world’s second-largest e-tailing market after the U.S. in recent years. As of 2016, the gross merchandise volume of online shopping in China had amounted to around 4.7 trillion yuan and is projected to reach approximately 10.8 trillion yuan by 2020. By then, the volume of B2C e-commerce sales in China was expected to reach 840.6 billion U.S. dollars. The largest B2C e-commerce retailer in China with regard to gross merchandise volume (GMV) had been Tmall. The B2C online retail platform operated by Alibaba Group had generated a transaction volume of about 2.13 trillion yuan in 2018. The GMV of the leading C2C online retail platform taobao.com, also operated by Alibaba group, had reached almost 2.7 trillion yuan that year.