China’s ecommerce spending to blast past $1 trillion in 2017

China’s online shoppers are on course to spend US$672 billion in 2015, according to the latest data from Emarketer. While China’s economy has struggled and slowed down over the summer, the country’s ecommerce growth looks set to remain strong. The estimated figure for 2015’s expenditure is up 42.1 percent on last year’s US$472.91 billion.

The Emarketer team reckons China’s ecommerce market will only slow moderately as the mature industry edges closer to saturation. By 2017, data suggests China’s shoppers will cross the trillion bucks milestone by spending US$1.21 trillion online.

A trillion dollars is a lot of cash. If the money were stacked up, it’d be taller than the Burj Khalifa.

(Illustration by Tech in Asia’s Andre Gunawan)

Retail shift

In 2015, China’s ecommerce spending will represent 15.9 percent of all retail sales, and by 2017 that’ll go up to 23.8 percent. By 2018, it could hit over US$1.5 trillion in spending, representing nearly 30 percent of all retail purchasing.

China is well ahead of the US in ecommerce in general as well as the seismic shift away from brick-and-mortar stores. America’s online spend will hit a predicted US$347.3 billion in 2015, which represents 7 percent of total retail sales. (Update: Added in our own illustration.)

See: In China, half of ecommerce spending will be on mobile in 2015