China’s Mobile Shopping Share Triples In 2014

Mobile shopping in China jumped 239 percent in 2014, more than tripling the value of mobile purchases in 2013 — and mobile will overtake other forms of Chinese online shopping by the end of next year, Internet Retailer reported.

Chinese mcommerce climbed to 929.7 billion yuan ($148 billion) in 2014 from 274 billion yuan ($43.7 billion) in 2013. That means mobile now represents almost exactly one-third of all online shopping in China, which grew 49.8 percent to 2.8 trillion yuan ($448.5 billion) in 2014. According to a report by Beijing-based market researcher iResearch, the big rise in mobile shopping is due largely to the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices, along with investments by leading online retailers for better serving mobile shoppers.

That gap between mobile and PC-based online shopping looks like it won’t last long, either. iResearch predicts that mobile will climb to 4.5 trillion yuan ($717.8 billion) in sales in 2018. While that 48 percent compound annual increase represents a big slowdown from last year’s torrid pace, much of it will come from PC-based online shopping’s share.

The result: iResearch projects that mobile sales will overtake PC-based e-commerce in 2016, and reach 61.7 percent of all Chinese online sales in 2018.

That has already happened for several leading Chinese e-commerce retailers who have also reported that most of their sales come from customers shopping on smartphones and tablets. For example, discount brand retailer Vipshop, which is third in mobile market share behind Alibaba and JD.com, said purchases on mobile devices accounted for 66 percent of its e-commerce sales volume in the last three months of 2014.

Alibaba hasn’t had that much of a shift to mobile, but its share of Chinese mcommerce has grown rapidly and it leads the pack for Chinese mobile shopping with 86.2 percent of mobile consumer purchases — an even higher share than its 80 percent of overall online shopping.

After Alibaba’s 86.2 percent share, the rest of China’s Top 10 mobile shopping retailers include JD.com (4.2 percent), Vipshop (2.1 percent), Suning.com (0.8 percent), Jumei.com (0.5 percent), Yhd.com (0.5 percent), GOME (0.4 percent), Amazon China (0.3 percent), Dangdang (0.3 percent) and Maimaibao (0.3 percent), iResearch reported.