Selling online in China

The E-commerce market has grown rapidly over the last ten years, spurred on by the advent of third party platforms such as Taobao and third party payment systems which have made Chinese consumers more at ease with spending online. It is estimated that around 160 million Chinese are now shopping online and this figure is set to increase to 231 million by 2013. The fast growth of E-commerce presents an attractive opportunity for EU SMEs to access Chinese markets, allowing them to promote their goods to a vast market spread across a large geographic area, for relatively little cost. This report outlines the development of China’s E-commerce market and describes the key models that EU SMEs can utilise to sell online.