Ecommerce is so huge in China that even the 2nd biggest store saw $71b in purchases last year

Fun fact: 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. That’s well ahead of the US’ seven percent ratio in 2015. Photo credit: Pexels.

You know ecommerce is insanely huge and fully ingrained in daily life in China when the country’s second largest online store booked US$71.6 billion in purchases in the past year. That’s the figure revealed today by JD, the closest competitor to Alibaba, in its newest earnings report.

Alibaba, which posted financials a few weeks earlier, is well ahead with a total of about US$460 billion worth of purchases on its Chinese shopping marketplaces in 2015.

JD now has 155 million active shoppers who collectively placed 1.26 billion fulfilled orders in 2015.

JD, which differs from Alibaba in that it mostly ships items to shoppers from its own inventory rather than relying on a huge network of merchants, says that its 2015 expenditure tally was up 78 percent on 2014’s. The ecommerce firm, in which WeChat maker Tencent has a 20 percent stake, now has 155 million annual active customers, up from just over 90 million back in 2014.

They collectively placed 1.26 billion orders that were fulfilled in 2015, which nearly doubled from the prior 12-month period.

Trillion-dollar baby

Ecommerce spending in China this year is expected to inch past US$900 billion, says Emarketer. The data revealed by Alibaba and JD, which together account for a very sizeable chunk of online shopping in China, seems to support that projection. By 2017, China’s appetite for buying stuff online will sail past a trillion, and it’ll be worth about US$1.57 trillion by 2018.

Amazon does not reveal consumer expenditure figures – known in the industry as gross merchandise volume, or GMV – which makes it hard to see how Alibaba and JD stack up against the US-based ecommerce giant. Amazon operates in China, but it’s a minor player there.

JD’s full Q4 2015 earnings report is here (PDF link).