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Global Online Purchasing Fever

China Today by LUO LAN, February 8, 2017 Adjust font size:

Expanding Yearly

As overseas consumers focus on Chinese websites, Chinese customers also use the Internet to browse commodities on the overseas market. Chinese people’s daily-use articles often include products from around the world, such as Japanese pharmaceuticals, Australian healthcare products, Korean cosmetics, French fashion garments, and Sri Lankan tea, most of which are bought online.

The Black Friday sales promotion offers consumers a dazzling array of goods.


Recent online shopping festivals generated huge profits for many e-commerce platforms. During the first 10 minutes of November 11, 2016, the amount of rice ordered from www.JD.com increased 100-fold, and JD’s global purchase orders registered a year-on-year growth of 170 percent. About 13,000 international brands were included in the Tmall online shopping festival, when it took just 9.5 hours for Tmall to surpass its 2015 Double 11 Festival sales volume. The amount of www.tepin.hk orders was also 5.5-fold that of 2015.

Black Friday, another manic shopping festival, is when overseas e-commerce platforms such as Amazon.com and ymatou.com recommend thousands of products to consumers. JD.com’s global purchasing has also launched services, such as panic and low price buying. Amazon China, meanwhile, offers Prime membership, while Alipay supports global payments covering more than 200 countries and regions.

Owing to their ever broadening range of consumer tastes and purchase demands, Chinese consumers have become the main force behind overseas online shopping. The PayPal and Ipsos Second Annual Global Report underlines 2015 as a significant year in this respect, as it was then that around 35 percent of Chinese consumers opted for overseas online shopping, compared to 26 percent in 2014.

The scope of Chinese overseas online shopping expands yearly, covering more than two million types of commodities from 100 countries and regions. The report showed that in 2015, around 22 percent of Chinese online buyers purchased from American websites, as compared with 14 percent in 2014. Purchases by Chinese consumers also showed 10 percent growth in Japan and South Korea, due to their high quality goods at favorable prices, and access to products not available in China.

Insiders report that the frequency in 2016 of Chinese overseas online shopping was 18 times per buyer, as compared to the seven times of 2015. The average amount expended was over RMB 10,000 – the highest more than RMB 900,000. According to China E-business Research Center projections, the number of Chinese overseas online shoppers will hit 35.6 million in 2018, equal to a more than RMB one trillion market.

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