Chinese e-commerce sales raked record revenues of $68.72 billion last year with over 71 per cent netizens shopping online, a report said on Monday.
E-commerce hit a record 553.1 billion yuan ($68.72 billion), an increase of 58 per cent over 2004 and the momentum is set to continue this year, China Daily quoted a new study as saying.
The consumer-to-consumer market has become the new growth point, with a turnover of $1.68 billion triple the 2004 volume according to the study by the China Internet Development Research Centre under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Domestic online auction site Taobao.com, which has 70 per cent of China's C2C market users and conducted transactions worth $1.2 billion last year, has beaten the Chinese unit of US auction service eBay to become the No 1 C2C website in the country by offering free services.
As part of the study, a CIDRC survey conducted last December among 3,483 netizens in five Chinese cities Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Xi'an and Jinan showed that by the end of last year, more than 71.3 per cent of netizens had shopped online, while this proportion in the Asia-Pacific region stood at an average of 70 per cent.
About 95 per cent of the respondents said they were optimistic about the future of online business, which indicated there would be continuous growth in the coming years.
The great variety of commodities available online and reliable payment methods are regarded as two major contributors to the increase, Ma Haitao, a CIDRC researcher who led the study, said.