Online retail sales in China will triple to more than $360 billion by 2015, powered both by growing numbers of Internet users and by greater consumer acceptance of e-commerce, according to a report by The Boston Consulting Group.
If not by 2015, then shortly thereafter, China will likely become the largest online retail market in the world, with close to 10 percent of retail sales occurring online. It already has more online shoppers than any other market, including the U.S. Once a fascination of the young and wealthy, the Internet is fast becoming a mass medium.
China will have 700 million Internet users in 2015—nearly 200 million more than today—and twice the online population of Japan and the U.S. combined. In 2011, Chinese consumers spent 1.9 billion hours a day online—an increase of 60 percent from two years earlier, according to China's Digital Generations 3.0: The Online Empire.
