Chinese consumers spent six times more on Amazon in 2015 compared with last year, according to an Amazon.cn 2015 Cross-border E-commerce Trend Report based on data from Amazon’s two platforms: Overseas Purchases and Global Selling.
The report also shows Chinese sellers, who have utilized Amazon.cn’s Global Selling to enter overseas markets, have grown 13 times from 2012 to 2015. Global Selling is a section of Amazon which allows sellers to set up shops on the e-commerce platform to sell products globally.
In addition, Chinese sellers have increased the amount of products they sell 87 times in three years. Some of the hot items from China selling overseas have diversified from clothes and computer accessories to tablets, smartphones, trash-eating robots, bluetooth headsets, drones and other tech-related goods.
Chinese consumers are contributing greatly to Amazon’s 294 million global users, the company claims without disclosing exact numbers of Chinese consumers. According to Chinese IT industry research group Analysys International, Amazon China had about 8.3 million active users in the third quarter 2014, compared with China’s largest e-commerce platform Tmall which had about 103 million active users during the same period.
Amazon China’s President Doug Gurr said on Monday at a press conference in Beijing that Amazon’s Overseas Purchase platform will continue to expand and cooperate with Amazon’s global sites. Amazon intends to strengthen partnerships with quality brands and suppliers around the world and promote domestic sellers at the same time.
“We want to help Chinese enterprises to easily expand to global markets in order to achieve strong growth, and to support them building competitive Chinese brands on the world stage,” he said.
In addition, the report analyzes Chinese cross-border consumption and provides insight into Chinese seller history, development, location, the development of brands and user behavior.
Overseas purchases experience explosive growth
From the time of its U.S. founding in August 1995, Amazon has had consumers from China shopping across borders to buy products from Amazon.
Chinese consumers have followed Amazon’s global expansion to Germany, England, France, Japan, Canada, Italy and Spain, shopping across borders and involving more and more categories.
The total consumption of Chinese consumers on Amazon global sites in 2015 has increased more than sixfold compared with a year ago.
Quality and price as a focus
Amazon.cn has determined cross-border online shopping in 2015 has the following four trends and features:
- Chinese consumers care about price, quality and the speed of logistics the most in cross-border online shopping.
- First-tier cities and southern cities take a dominant position in cross-border online shopping.
- Footwear and health products are the two most popular categories for China’s cross-border online shopping in 2014. This year, toys and outdoor products are gaining traction.
- Judging from the profiles of online shoppers, users are becoming younger, more educated and have higher incomes.