To speak of China is to speak of a new world of possibilities. An opportunity that allows you to develop and grow as a company.
What happens if we combine e-commerce and a major power like China? A gigantic door opens. To set up a new e-commerce in China is to open up a market opportunity.
E-commerce in China, a growing trend
Already a year ago, a McKinsey & Co. study was conducted, where the result was that e-commerce in China would experience a great development in consecutive years. It has not been for less.
China’s e-commerce volume exceeds US$1.5 trillion and reflected an annual growth of 21.3%. In 2017, the volume is expected to double to US$3.46 trillion.
Last May, Bain & Company published a report announcing that China’s online retail sales were set to grow to $1.6 trillion by 2020. In addition, the same company emphasized that they are no longer only driven by price but also by brand.
It is also worth noting that women are a great market opportunity, as a survey of 5,500 women in large cities such as China, Hong Kong and Taiwan who hold high positions agreed that they would prefer to shop online rather than in a physical store.
The results of the survey detailed that 63% surf the Internet in search of products and services at least once a day, and almost 30% do so two and three times a day.
E-commerce is becoming a real protagonist in business. With them, we remove the barriers that exist between countries and shorten distances. We create a new link, a new company-customer relationship.
The growth of the Chinese online market is spectacular.
A change in legislation to boost the market
Until last year, investors from outside China were required to have a local partner as this allowed them to own a maximum of 55% of the company’s shares. But now the legislation has changed and this condition is not necessary, so that the new regulation represents a commercial opportunity for both large companies and SMEs, which opens up a large niche of potential customers in the sector.
With this reform, they intend to allow foreign investors to hold 100% of the capital of e-commerce companies, which is expected to increase the number of international startups or e-commerce companies targeting the Chinese market.
Asian e-commerce giants
There are some platforms on the Internet that are frequently used as e-commerce and that handle orders all over the world.
One of the big ones is AliExpress, part of the Alibaba group, whose purpose is to connect sellers, suppliers and end customers. Its catalog offers consumers its products at factory prices direct from China.
It differs from Alibaba in that Alibaba includes international suppliers while AliExpress only works with China-based companies.
Alibaba platform becomes the preferred platform for mobile commerce in China. Its platforms register up to 76% of e-commerce transactions in this country. Its domains extend across several payment platforms and shopping portals, such as Alipay, which accounts for nearly half of this market with 48.7%. It is an online payment platform based on escrow.
Taobao is another of the platforms, this is a digital platform that facilitates companies and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores to reach consumers internationally.
The revolution of social networks is more than evident. It is well known the boom they cause and the way in which companies, nowadays, start to manage their business through them.
A growth opportunity just a click away.
Singles’ Day, the day with the most online sales
As a curious and surprising fact to emphasize the incredible potential that China has as an e-commerce, we did not want to fail to mention the online sales record that was broken in one day with the “Single’s Day” where sales of more than 13,357 million euros were produced.
