The development of China‘s online retail market continued to improve and the market scale reached a new high in 2020.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, national online retail sales reached 11.76 trillion yuan, an increase of 10.9% year-on-year, and online retail sales of physical goods reached 9.76 trillion yuan, an increase of 14.8% year-on-year, representing almost a quarter of total retail sales of consumer goods.
China’s Ministry of Commerce highlighted that the role of online retailing in promoting consumption, stabilizing foreign trade, expanding employment and protecting people’s livelihoods has continued to increase.
Retail market
All this has contributed to a vitality for the formation of a new development pattern in which the dual national and international cycles are the fundamental pillar.
Overall, China’s online retail market exhibited the following characteristics in 2020:
New business formats and new models are developing rapidly. The key monitoring e-commerce platform has accumulated more than 24 million live streams, online education sales increased by more than 140% year-on-year, and the number of online patient medical consultations increased by 73.4% year-on-year.
Shopping festival
Large-scale online shopping promotion activities, such as «Double Eleven» and the «Online New Years Festival» currently being held, have promoted the release of demand and strongly stimulated market growth; Ecological, healthy, «home scene» and «home economy» consumption, fitness equipment, health care, food, disinfection and hygiene products, mid-range and high-end kitchen appliances, and pet products are highlighted. grew by more than 30%, while online and offline integration accelerated, and e-commerce companies accelerated the transformation and upgrade of offline entities.
International Trade
Second, cross-border e-commerce continues to strive to promote the development of foreign trade.
According to customs statistics, the import and export volume of cross-border e-commerce reached 1.69 trillion yuan in 2020, an increase of 31.1 percent.
The rapid development of cross-border e-commerce has benefited from a number of favorable policies.
In 2020, it continued to intensify «Silk Road e-commerce» cooperation with 22 countries.
Third, the quality of rural e-commerce has improved and e-commerce has continued to develop agriculture.
Business big data monitoring shows that national rural online retail sales will reach 1.79 trillion yuan in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 8.9 percent.
