According to CNNIC, online shopping transactions in China reached RMB1.26t in 2012, up 67% YoY and representing 6.1% of the country’s total retail sales. The country’s online shopping population reached 242m (up 25% YoY), representing a 43% penetration rate of the total online population. Mobile shoppers saw much stronger growth. The number of those conducting e-commerce on mobile devices increased by some 137% YoY, reaching 55.4m as of 2012
Over 56% of total online shoppers spent more than RMB1,000 in the year, while some 6.8% of them spent as much as RMB10k online. Meanwhile, people tended to make online purchase more frequently than 2011.
A majority of users made payments through online banking or third party payments, representing ~63% and ~62% of total online consumers, respectively. Alipay remained the dominant payment platform in China, covering ~94% of overall users, followed by Tenpay (with a ~12% penetration rate) and UnionPay Online (~11%).
Taobao was the most popular online shopping platform in China in 2012, representing an ~88% penetration rate amongst Chinese online shoppers, followed by Tmall (~51%), 360Buy (~30%), Dangdang (~17%), and Vancl (~12%).
Interestingly, the percentage of online shoppers who conducted purchasing on only one site declined steadily from 80% in 2009 to 51% in 2012. In the year, roughly 49% of Taobao users made purchases only on Taobao’s site, the highest amongst all online shopping platforms. The percentages on other platforms were all below 16%.
In terms of churn rates, Newegg China had a user churn as high as 37.5% in 2012, followed by Amazon China (14.8%). This could suggest that the overseas ecommerce giants still have a way to go on the localization user experience front to retain users in China.