In 2013, Chinese citizens should become the world leader in terms of e-commerce expenses, topping the United States. These are the results of a report published end of august by Bain & company, and the trend should definitively be stronger and stronger since the Chinese leader of e-commerce, Taobao predicts that, within 10 years, a typical Chinese household should have more than 50% of its expenses consisting of e-commerce when it is only 6% today.
The pace of change is amazing. Between 2009 and 2012, the e-commerce market growth has been 71% a year in China, when in the meantime it was only 13% in the USA.
In 2015, online sales should amount to RMB 3.300 billions (around 400 billion euros) according to Bain & company.
2013 should be the “switching year”: in 2012, Chinese ciizens online expenses have been 212 billions dollars, when American citizens have spent 229 billions dollars.
This report seems reliable since Bain has surveyed ore than 1300 online shoppers across all city tiers.
This might be because Chinese consumers have been more flexible to change their consuming habits compared with countries where consuming habits are much more deeply rooted. They have been very easy to convince to use smartphones to make their smartphones to buy things, and are not atached to buy products in stores, accept that third parties deliver the goods to them.
This implies a lot of changes in the consuming habits: it appeared that more than half chinese buyers systematically browse various websites before they decide what seller they are going to trust, comparing prices online.
This has led to the success of some leading e-commerce sites, such as Etao, a site that compares the price of a product on the different websites that offer it, and then quicly acess the website with the best offer, geerating 2.3 unique visitirs each day.
The survey distingues different types of behavious according to their sending abilities and their appetite for online shopping, defining the digital leaders, the value seekers, the old school and the bare minimum consumer. The study shows as well that the online retailers are more and more specializing and that some industries definitely have their leaders.
It means that adding online sale channel is not an option anymore in China, it is an imperative, and that everyone has to learn how to attract its loyal customers, meregrs and acquisitions with online retailers are likely to be more and more frequent.
This is true in all fields, including our real estate speciality !
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